Pining for Christmas
by William Easley
Summary: As the Pines Family approaches the memorable Christmas of 2014, this series of loosely connected stories follows their highs and lows into the holidays and the New Year... Festive Wendip, as you might expect...
1. Chapter 1

**Pining for Christmas**

 _[Christmas of 2014 was special for the Pines family. However, Christmas isn't made in a day. These interconnected tales will lead into—and out of—those special times in a year that ended happily, or at least interestingly, for the Mystery Twins and their friends and family. Because your humble author is suddenly busy with mundane matters, I hope this will wrap up by this Christmas!]_

* * *

 **1: A Few Small Confessions (Saturday, November 22, 2014)**

Confession, they say, is good for the soul. Ford and Stan, for reasons of their own, had agreed that confessions were in order. However, anyone who has a lick of sense will confess when the person they're confessing to is in a nice mood.

No one ever accused the Pines twins of being lickless, sense-wise.

Accordingly, that Saturday evening in November, Stanford and Stanley double-dated—Ford and his fiancée, Lorena Jones, and Stan and his, Sheila Remley—driving over to Portland, where the weather was considerably balmier than in Gravity Falls on the other side of the mountains, for a meal in a trendy (and expensive, but never mind that) Italian restaurant on 30th Street.

It was a cozy place, the back room equipped with leather-lined booths that gave a sense of privacy. In making the reservation, Stanford insured that the privacy was a little more complete—he had arranged to rent out the entire room for an hour and a half for a private party. The headwaiter seemed a bit surprised that the private party consisted of just four people, but discreetly accepting a fifty-dollar tip from Stanford, he somehow contained his astonishment and turned them over to a waiter and a wine water. These two suggested choice selections from the menu, pushed the specials, and tactfully changed Stan's wine suggestion from "Some of that red stuff" to a very fine Barolo, exquisite in aroma and taste.

As they waited for their entrees, with his eyebrows raised inquiringly, Ford glanced at Stan and Stan nodded in confirmation. So, after more than one and not as much as too many glasses of wine, Ford took a little black cubic jewel box from his jacket pocket. "Lorena," he said, taking her hand, "this is the ring I promised. Thank you for agreeing to be my wife."

He slipped the engagement ring on her finger, and she gasped. "It's so beautiful!" The stone was at least two carats, and even in the candlelight at the table, it sparkled in a whole prism of colors, far more enchantingly than any other diamond they had ever seen.

Sheila oohed and aahed, and then with a grin, Stan took a matching box from his own pocket. "Sheila, you already accepted my family heirloom ring, and I wouldn't replace that. But I couldn't let my Brainiac brother pull somethin' like this and not match him! So—here's the twin stone for you, in a simple necklace."

It was, you could say, simple—simple platinum, the chain gleaming in the light and supple as silk to the touch. Sheila's gemstone nested in a buttercup setting that emphasized the flashing spears of multicolored light radiating from it. "Is this even a diamond?" Sheila asked, dangling it from her palm. "It's so brilliant!"

Ford and Stan glanced at each other again, and the Ford cleared his throat and said, "Well, we have a confession to make. Yes, these _are_ diamonds, but not the ordinary sort. These stones are Rhidicollite, a crystalline form of carbon, just like run-of-the-mill diamonds, but formed under immensely different conditions. The fractal structure of most diamond crystals is octahedral, but these are hexadecagonal."

Lorena nodded gravely and then said, "I don't know what that means."

Sheila, her eyes wide, said, "I do. Sixteen-sided, not eight-sided. That must be why they're so much brighter than ordinary diamonds." Sheila had been a physics major.

Sheila turned for Stan, and he fastened the necklace for her, tugging to make sure the catch had securely closed. He said, "Yeah, yeah, sixteen, eight, whatever, all's I know is they're beautiful, to match you."

Sheila ran her fingers down the delicate chain, smiled and kissed him and then said to Lorena, "What did I tell you? The man's a con artist!"

" _A_ con artist?" Stan asked, chuckling. "Babes, I am _the_ con artist!"

"Wait a minute. These Rhidicollite crystals _can't_ occur naturally," Lorena said.

"No," Ford agreed. "I found them—well, you'll know sooner or later, so let me complete the confession. This is highly confidential, you understand, ladies. I found the matrix stone from which these were cut many years ago on a crashed alien ship in Gravity Falls Valley."

"A crashed alien—you mean a spaceship?" Lorena asked, her voice excited. "That is so intriguing! There was a spaceship in Gravity Falls?"

"Oh, it's still there—if you know just where to look," Ford said. "In fact, I still visit it now and again."

"Maybe you can take me to see it," Lorena suggested.

Squirming and rubbing the back of his neck, Ford said, "Well—it can be a little bit dangerous for someone who's never been there before, but—we'll see."

"Is this from a whole different planet?" Sheila asked, admiring her necklace.

"It could be," Ford said. "The aliens, from everything I can discover, were great collectors, taking artifacts, samples, and even specimens from thousands of different worlds. So, yes, the mineral is very likely from a strange planet far out in the cosmos. The Rhidicollite, among other properties, is nearly twice as hard as other diamonds."

"Yeah, and the only way they could be cut," Stan said as he poured Lorena a second glass of wine, "was with a kinda super-powerful laser beam that Ford also conveniently found on the ship."

"Um—not quite," Ford said, holding up his right forefinger. "I found the _components_ and assembled a laser from them. Again, the heart of it is a unique gemstone quite unknown on Earth. Quite recently, Dr. McGucket was able to use the laser to shape the crystals into these gems for us."

"To cut to the chase, these dinglebats are the rarest of the rare," Stan said. "Only two ridiculamawhoozits on Earth!"

"I hope they're insured!" the practical Lorena said.

"Oh, yeah, yeah, out the wazoo," Stan replied with a grin. "We took care of that!"

And they had. A week earlier, Stanley had phoned a very old friend and distant cousin of his—a fellow who lived in Philly and whose business interests were all one hundred per cent completely and very nearly legitimate these days, but who still had a good many shady acquaintances.

Once Stan had explained the situation—"Mazel tov, Stanny!" the voice on the phone said—the old man chuckled. "Stanny, ya got nothin' to worry about. I'll get the word out. No punk thief in his right mind would target you and your brother, and take it from me, the big-time operators will leave you and your ladies strictly alone."

Of course, to supplement the word on the underworld grapevine, Ford had also bought more mundane insurance for both gems—to the tune of a million dollars each, since the best appraiser in the country when faced with the two identical stones had all but burst into tears before giving up at "At least a million apiece!"

The diners had to cut short their discussion as two waiters brought their food in, steaming and smelling terrific. Then they had to decide on extra Parmesan or no, had to decline a second order of breadsticks, and had to assure the headwaiter that everything looked good. And finally, they could eat.

Over the meal, they turned from aliens and such to talk about some practical considerations. "For the time being," Ford told Lorena and Sheila, "Fiddleford and Mayellen say we can continue to live with them in the old Northwest house. However, both Stanley and I believe it's our responsibility as, well, married men, to provide you with homes of your own."

Stanley rolled his eyes. "Always a lecture! Gals, whattaya think about living near the Shack?" Stan asked, his voice showing his excitement. "Not _in_ it, mind you!"

Lorena smiled immediately. "I'd love it! Soos and Melody are so nice—they'd be great neighbors!"

And Sheila took Stan's hand. "Honey, that's fine with me, too. But—won't we crowd them?"

"Nah," Stan said with a laugh. "When Ford bought the land, it was right at 700 acres. I've been addin' onto that over the years—land's cheap up that way, not least because a lotta people in the Valley think it's cursed. It ain't really though. At least, I think the curse is off since all the undead jerks have been put to rest. Anyways, today between us, Ford and me own—what is it, Ford?"

"Twenty-seven hundred acres, give or take a few," Ford said. "That's a bit over four square miles of property. Stanley and I have talked about it—we could build houses on Gopher Road, closer to town than the Shack, but on the same side of the road. Each lot would run to about ten acres and Cold Creek would back onto them. Very scenic. Our driveways would lead back through a fine stand of pines to a great level, grassy meadow, where we'd build. We wouldn't be so close that we'd be in each other's pockets, but it would be just a short walk from one house to the other—or up the hill to the Shack, where I plan to keep my lab."

"So whattaya think?" Stan asked. "Either of you don't like it, it's off."

"It sounds great to me," Lorena said. "That's such a nice, quiet part of the valley."

"Actually—" Ford started.

Stan cut him off: "Yeah, real peaceful. _Real_ quiet!" Ford shrugged and smiled.

"Could we go look at the land?" asked Sheila. "I'm sure I'll like it, but now I'm excited to see the view!"

"Oh, sure. You gals want to go out there tomorrow afternoon?" Stan asked. "S'posed to be partly sunny and warmer, the weatherman says."

"It's a date!" Lorena said, and Sheila squeezed Stan's hand in agreement.

"Now, as to the style of house—" Ford began.

"Ours _has_ to be a log house!" Sheila said, all but bouncing in her seat like Mabel on a sugar high. "I'd want it to match the look of the Mystery Shack if possible!"

"Hey, right," Stan said. "That'll be easy. We'll get Manly Dan to put together a construction crew. He's a hell of a good contractor, ya know! We can tap into the city water line, run underground electrics so's as not to mess up the view, and you can decide exactly where on the lot you'd like the house to be."

"Mr. Corduroy built the Shack originally," Ford said. "Of course, it was originally just my house, and he was Boyish Dan back then. How about you, Lorena? Maybe a nice brick Tudor or—"

She tapped him on the arm. "None of that! You know I always wanted a log house, too," she said. She caught her breath sharply and looked away.

Ford shifted uncomfortably. He had momentarily forgotten that Lorena's first husband had been planning to build a log house up in the mountains when he'd been stricken down by a fatal heart attack. "Well—yes, I'd like that, too. If you're really sure," he said softly.

She turned back, tears gleaming in her eyes, but smiling. "I wouldn't have it any other way," she said in a quiet, firm tone. "It would be like an old promise fulfilled."

And so, matters were settled, and they had a little more wine, lots of good food, and lots of laughter. In fact, afterward Stan and the ladies were all just a wee bit tipsy, but Ford, always abstemious, had drunk only two small glasses of the wine, and they walked around Portland for an hour or so as the effects of those wore off until he said he was perfectly OK to drive.

" _That's_ a matter of opinion," Stan growled. Though Ford's driving skills had come back and improved over the past couple of years, Stan still distrusted Ford's habit of falling into a lecture and, turning to face his audience in the car, failing to notice a deer or a freight train crossing the road just ahead.

However, they made it safely back. Later, close to midnight in Gravity Falls, they parked at a scenic lookout—not to make out, as two teenage couples might have done, but to finish their talk.

An autumn chill had definitely come to the Valley, and they sat close together, Ford and Lorena in front, Stan and Sheila in the back seat, keeping each other warm. The night had that startling crisp clearness that comes along in November, when the humidity is low and the stars shine undimmed. There was no moon, and above them they could see constellations: Ford pointed out Orion, Pegasus, and Cassiopeia, and told them where to look to catch sight of the Andromeda galaxy, about two-thirds of the way from Cassiopeia and Pegasus. And then the windows began to fog up.

For a while the astronomy lesson was suspended. And then, from where he snuggled in the back seat with Sheila, Stan said, "Poindexter, better tell 'em the rest of it. We decided, and you said you wanted to break it to them 'cause you're more diplomatic than me."

"All right," Ford said, nervously drumming his six-fingered hands on the steering wheel. "This is the last thing. We both hope it won't change your minds or anything, but—well, if it does, then we'll understand."

"Yeah, and you can keep the stones," Stan said. "But we've got something else to confess."

"What is it?" Sheila asked. She and Stan were holding hands.

"Go ahead. You said you'd tell 'em, Ford," Stanley said.

"All right." Stanford cleared his throat. "Everyone in town has noticed the changes in Stanley and me these past couple of months," he said. "We've told you we went to a special spa in Florida, and that's partly true, but mostly, well, a lie."

"Yeah, see, it's _sorta_ true 'cause the word 'spa' basically means a mineral spring. One that's supposed to give ya good health and vitality, blah blah blah."

Ford overrode his brother: "We, well, found—there's no other way to say it, I'm afraid—we found the Fountain of Youth."

"Really?" Lorena asked, sounding interested but not particularly surprised. She had grown up in Gravity Falls.

"Really," Stan said. "The owner gave us just a little sample of the water, and we kinda-sorta promised not ever to ask for any more of the stuff. But—well, Stanford and I both drank it, and a couple weeks ago we both went to the doctor for a check-up."

"He puts our somatic ages at approximately forty-eight to fifty years old," Ford said. "He says we're in exceptional shape for men close to seventy."

"To sum up, we got back close to twenty years of our lives," Stanley said. "Funny thing, we each felt like the other one deserved to get back thirty years, see, 'cause that's how long Ford was lost in weird dimensions and how much time it took for me to figure a way to get him back. I guess it's impossible to judge the right amount of water for that, so the guy is generous and gives us enough for about forty years—"

"Wait," Sheila said. "So—what? You actually got younger? It's permanent?"

Ford said, "Well, we're aging again, of course, but at a normal rate. And it's complicated. We didn't lose memories—it doesn't affect the mind, evidently—but yes, our bodies are in effect between seventeen and twenty years younger than our chronological ages."

"Hope that ain't a deal-breaker," Stanley put in.

Ford continued, "The main thing is, we started to feel strange about asking you ladies to marry us because we were so much older than you were."

"But now," Stan said, "we got a shot at livin' out a normal married life with you, 'stead of checkin' out as dried-up old guys in ten, twenty years or so. So—is this a deal breaker?"

Both women laughed. "You big silly!" Lorena said, giving Ford a fond little shove. "Of _course_ it isn't. Ford, I'd marry you in a heartbeat if you were ten years _older_ instead of nearly twenty years younger than when we first met! And now we just about match!"

"Same goes for me," Sheila said, nuzzling Stanley's neck. "But I have to say—hope I don't embarrass you, Stanley—I prefer you the way you are right now, with a little more youthful, ah, let's say vigor!"

"Hot tamales!" Stanley exclaimed before kissing her.

"Now," Lorena said from the front seat, next to Ford, "I think the very next thing we ought to do is for Ford to drop you and Sheila off at your place—and then for him and me to go back to _my_ place. And we won't see you until tomorrow morning at breakfast. A _late_ breakfast!"

"Make it _brunch,"_ Ford said, hugging her.

And, as it turned out, that was just fine for Stanley and Sheila, too.


	2. Chapter 2

**2\. Early Christmas Card (Friday and Saturday, December 5-6, 2014)**

* * *

Friday evening when the email from Wendy's phone came in, Dipper saw it had an attachment. He read the message first: "Check out my new swimsuit!"

And then he opened the attachment, a photo of Wendy in—yes, a bikini! Or at least a two-piece. At first he just stared at her, all of her almost, except the photo cut off her feet, though her ribbon-wrapped legs looked as if she were wearing the gladiator sandals that led to his giving her a foot massage back during Woodstick. She was smiling in a provocative way.

For some reason, just then his room felt very warm to Dipper.

He wondered if she'd set her phone camera to "delay" or whether maybe Tambry had taken the shot. He thought the background looked like Tambry's room—not that he'd been in it, but it seemed to be the kind of room she'd have.

Whoever took it, the photographer wouldn't have been one of her brothers or her dad, because, well, because of the way Wendy was _dressed_! The swimsuit was not really all that brief, but it was, um, festive. That is, the bra part was a holly-berry red, the bottom a holly-leaf green, trimmed with white.

Oh, and Wendy was holding a peppermint-striped candy cane.

Dipper felt his heart beating faster. Mmm, the girl loved peppermint!

Grinning foolishly, Dipper pocketed his phone and then used his laptop to open the email and the picture. However, he heard Mabel pounding up the stairs, so he quickly saved the photo and minimized the screen. "Hi, Brobro!" Mabel said, banging his bedroom door open—the closest she ever came to knocking. "I'm going back to work on my stuff. Would you mind helping me pack my art supplies? I got a ton, and some of them are fragile!"

Packing. Because right after Christmas would come the Pines family's move to the new house, down on the cul-de-sac. Oh, Dipper and Mabel would be in Gravity Falls when the truck came and loaded up and trundled everything down the street, probably in about ten loads, so they wouldn't have to worry about that, but packing up their possessions was their responsibility.

Already all of Dipper's books were down in the guest room, loaded in stacked cardboard banker's boxes, taped shut, each one neatly labeled: "Dipper, Science Fiction, Box 1"; "Dipper, True Occult and Paranormal"; "Dipper, Mysteries, Box 2" and so on. The new house had a huge basement room already earmarked as a library—Dad was having carpenters install floor-to-ceiling built-in bookshelves—so most of these would find a home down there.

The three boxes that would not were labeled "Dipper's Books, Left Bedroom top of the Stairs." In one of these three boxes were the first three of Ford's Journals, plus a bound photocopy of Journal 4, and two of Dipper's own Journals, plus a few very rare old books, some of them as fragile as anything Mabel might pack, the kind of old volume that smelled peppery with age and had leaves that threatened to crumble if handled too roughly. That box was marked "TAKE EXTRA CARE."

Good-naturedly, Dipper went to help Mabel in her cluttered bedroom. The problem wasn't with the bolts of fabric, the glue guns and scissors and other tools, the glitter sprinklers, the plastic jars of beads, bangles, or coils of wire—no, the real trouble came with the very breakable stuff, like some delicate clay sculptures, some intricate origami pieces that Mabel had gotten good at making before she became bored with the whole folding bit, some glass ornaments, things like that. Those had to be swaddled in layers of bubble wrap, taped, and carefully stored in sturdy boxes that would go inside other boxes. It took time.

"I can't wait to see Teek," Mabel said over their work. "Except I haven't bought him anything yet! What would he like, Dipper? He's a guy! You're a guy! So what's a guy presenty thing?"

"How about . . . a picture of you?" Dipper asked. It was the first thing that popped into his mind, because he was thinking of the photo of Wendy. Maybe he could print it out and frame it. Uh, maybe not, though. Mom would be sure to see it, and there would be questions. And Mabel would have even more embarrassing questions!

His twin sister, kneeling on the carpet and holding a glass unicorn, appeared to be pondering the photo idea. "Well—that would be _adorable_ ," Mabel admitted. "But kinda egotistical, isn't it? I mean, maybe he'd like it, though. I could give him one of my class pictures—"

"Don't think so," Dipper said. He and Mabel had gone through a short but intense zitty phase just before picture day, and even makeup didn't hide her bumpy chin and cheeks. "Those didn't turn out so great this year. Hey, how about a sexy picture?" Dipper asked, raising his eyebrows.

Mabel giggled. "Dipper, you reprobate! That might get us both in trouble, him and me, I mean. And if we go down for it, you're taking the fall, too, for suggesting it! But I have to admit, the idea is intriguing! Are we talking a tasteful nude study here, or flat-out wild and crazy smut?"

"No!" Dipper said hastily, nearly dropping a carton of clay sculptures. "I didn't mean anything like that! Just, you know, a photo of you looking really, uh, desirable. I don't know. Swimsuit picture, maybe, in a nice frame!"

" _Not_ a swimsuit," Mabel said definitely. "I want to shape up some before I go that route."

"You are _not_ fat!"

"No, but I'm no Pacifica, either! I ought to slim down."

"You'd look anorexic!"

"Nah, maybe five pounds is all. Because, you know, my upstairs is growing." She waggled her shoulders, sort of making everything bounce. "A picture would sort of set it off if I didn't have my little tummy bulge."

Dipper taped the box he was working on shut. "Forget it! I'm sorry I even suggested it!"

"Aww, you're all blushy-blush pink, Broboat! That's so cute. C'mon, you've seen Wendy naked!"

"Not on purpose!" Dipper insisted. "We—we haven't—we don't—"

"Mm-hmm. Second base, but the field's under a tarp, huh?" Mabel asked. "Oh, wait, there was that crazy pond thing, when she like turned into a water sculpture of herself—that was nude. 'Course, if the lady's liquid, I guess the guy can't exactly cop a feel. But then when she turned back into herself, she'd lost her bra! And as I remember, you guys were pressed pretty close together!"

"Mabel, please!" Dipper groaned. "Believe me, at times like that, I'm not thinking about, you know, fooling around and stuff!"

"Wouldn't know it from your Internet history," Mabel teased. She mimicked Dipper's voice: "Oh, here's a site marked 100 Hot Redheads, better check it out for clues!"

"I've seen some of the sites _you_ visit," Dipper retorted. "They're not all arts and crafts!"

"True, but _my_ faves are merely for educational purposes," Mabel said. "'Cause when I finally do it, I wanna know how to do it right!"

"This whole discussion is making me uncomfortable," Dipper said. "Look, OK, Teek's present, why not, I don't know, knit him a sweater?"

"Yeah, I'm gonna, but he'll _expect_ something like that," Mabel said. Her eyes narrowed. "The essence of a successful attack is surprise. OK, I do like your idea, but how about a picture with me fully clothed, but curled up on a sofa or something, giving him a come-hither smile? You know, bedroom eyes?"

"Let's see it," Dipper said.

Mabel made a face at him.

He shook his head. "Um, no. Looks more like your expression on the boat just before you puked."

She grinned from ear to ear. "Hah! That was a fun trip!"

In the end, the next morning Mabel settled for a photo—Dipper took it, making a dozen exposures so she could find a good one—of her in a fairly snug pink tee shirt and fairly short purple shorts, with flip-flops on her feet. They walked over to the park and she sat in a swing and struck half a dozen different poses, leaning back as if about to kick off and swing toward the camera, sitting, standing and clinging to the swing chain, a whole range.

She eventually picked one of her on the swing, hands gripping the chains, left foot on the ground, right leg extended, right foot in the air, toes pointed. She was leaning back enough to let her hair flow free, and Dipper had taken that one from the side. "This has the right attitude of 'Hey, I'm a pretty girl and I'll let you see what I got,' and yet a certain modesty, too," Mabel said as she looked at the camera screen. "This ought to get him hot and bothered!"

"Do girls really think about doing that to guys?" Dipper asked.

"Of course!" Mabel said. "I'm gonna see him right after Christmas! This is just, you know . . . priming the pump."

* * *

 **From the Journals of Dipper Pines:** _Saturday, December 6—it was my fault. I should have closed the photo instead of minimizing it. But I forgot. Then today right after lunch, I heard Mabel in her room, yelping, "Oh, no, you din't!"_

 _She was sitting on her bed with my laptop on her knees. And she was staring at the photo of Wendy. I saw that as soon as I came in. She turned to me with an evil grin. "So this is where you got your idea for my present to Teek, you libertine, you!" I don't know where she gets her vocabulary._

" _That's private!" I said._

" _Nuh-uh! Man, what do you and Wendy get up to, Brobro? This is kinda beyond the pale, innit?"_

" _It's just Wendy in a two-piece bathing suit," I told her. "It's no big deal!"_

" _What are you, blind?" Mabel shot back. "She's in a HALF-piece, Dippingsauce! Take a closer look!"_

 _She had blown the photo up to full screen, and I peered at it. And then I realized—Wendy's top wasn't a top at all. Because I could see—well, you know, features. "Body paint?" I asked, my voice coming out all high and squeaky._

" _Yuppers! Nice job, but just her and a layer of paint! She's built really nice."_

" _Mabel!"_

" _Well, she is, you lucky dog, you! Guess she got tired of the under-the-tarp second base, huh?"_

 _I felt my face glowing. This—wasn't like Wendy. "Something's wrong," I said._

" _Word of advice, Bro," Mabel told me. "If you print this out, keep it in the bottom of your underwear drawer, beneath the drawer liner, with the rest of—"_

" _How do you know about—"_

" _I know about everything! Everywhere! All the time!" Mabel said. "Of course, I know THOSE six photos are just girls' bodies from the Internet that you Pixelshopped Wendy's head on. THIS is the real deal!"_

 _That made me groan_. " _I don't know why I fool around making those fake pictures. It's just that I miss her so much," I muttered miserably. "And it's not just, you know, a physical thing."_

 _How can I explain to Mabel what the mental connection means to me, the one that Wendy and I have when we touch skin to skin? It's like making out, but so much deeper. I mean, it goes way down to the soul! And, yes, I'd like to be able to, you know, well, what every guy would like to do with the girl he's in love with, I guess, but we promised each other we'd wait, and in spite of some strong temptations last summer, we held off. The pictures I tricked up—well, a guy can fantasize. Even though he feels guilty about it._

 _Mabel, to my surprise, stared at me and said softly, "This really is bugging you."_

" _Yeah, it is," I admitted._

 _She closed out the photo. "I saved it under a different file name," she told me. "It's now circuitschematic dot jpeg."_

" _Thanks," I said._

 _She gave me back my laptop—hers was downstairs, she explained, and she'd been too lazy to go looking for it when she wanted to format the picture I'd taken of her. In opening the photo folder, she'd found the one Wendy had sent me. Well, I hadn't closed it, so as soon as the folder opened, up it popped._

 _I took the computer back to my room. I paused in the doorway and said, "Sis? Big favor? Don't bother me for a little while?"_

" _You rampant debauchee!" she said, giggling._

" _No, NOT that," I told her. "I've got to call Wendy and find out what's wrong."_

" _Oh."_

* * *

Wendy answered on the first ring. "Hiya, Dip! 'Sup, man?"

Dipper took a deep breath. "I, uh, really like your picture. But—well, it's—"

"Hang on, hang on—what picture are you talking about?" Wendy asked, sounding puzzled.

"The, uh, photo you sent me from your phone yesterday," Dipper said. "I mean, it's gorgeous, but—"

"I didn't send you any picture," Wendy said. "Wait, when was this?"

"Um, early evening, about seven-thirty or eight, I think."

"Tambry!" Wendy said. "What's the picture like?"

"Uh, it's you, in, in what looked like a two-piece bathing suit, uh, green and red, only, the, uh, the top, you know—"

"Oh, my God, no! No, no, no, no! Hang on, hang on, dude, I'm going out to my car so we can talk in private. Dipper, I'm just so—wait a minute." Sounds of the house door opening and closing, then fast footsteps through dry leaves, and then the click and clunk of the Dodge Dart door opening and closing again. "Gonna turn on the engine. It's pretty cold up here, get the heater going. I should've put on a coat. There we go. OK, tell you what, I gotta get away from the house for this. let me call you back in about ten minutes."

"OK," Dipper said.

It was closer to fifteen minutes. Then his phone played a tune, "I Will Always Believe in Fairy Tales," the one he'd composed and played for Wendy. He'd recorded it on his computer and had made that her ring tone. "Hi," he said. "OK to talk now?"

Her voice sounded shaky: "Yeah, I've parked near the water tower, nobody's around. Dipper, I'm just so sorry! That's a photo from last year. Me and Tambry were fooling around one afternoon with body paint, and we snapped photos of each other with, you know, painted bras on. I never meant anybody to see it. I thought I'd erased it, in fact, but I just scrolled through and found it on my phone. See, yesterday Tambry and I were out at a restaurant, and because her battery was dead, she borrowed my phone to call Robbie. While she was doing that, I went to the restroom. I guess while I was gone, she must've found the picture and thought it would be cute to email it to you. I—I never meant you to see it. Sorry, man."

Dipper's face felt hot—he seemed to be tapping into Wendy's acute embarrassment. "Oh—well, don't be sorry. I, uh. I liked it anyway! I like it a _lot_!"

Wendy grunted. "I swear I will rip her highlights out!"

"No, don't do that," Dipper said hastily. "Look, tell Tambry I never even noticed the paint, because the picture's really small on a phone, and you asked me to erase it, and I did. But tell her it was a bad idea. Uh—do you have one of her in body paint?"

"Actually, let's see. Back in a few." She put him on hold for several seconds, and then he heard her again: "Yeah, I still do. Very light lavender and you can see, like, everything! You want a copy?"

"NO!" Dipper said. "No, no. But, you know, show it to her and ask her how she'd like it if you sent that to Robbie's folks. Or to her parents. 'Cause Mabel saw yours and she was the one who noticed it was, you know, body paint."

"Oh, man!" Wendy sighed. "There goes my cred with Mabes!"

"No, I don't think so," Dipper told her. "She seemed to think it was, you know, just sort of, I guess, intimate fun. Said it was cute. She kinda thinks you and I are, well, you know, fooling around more than we really do."

"Times I want to, man!" Wendy confessed. "So bad. Like right this minute, if I thought doin' it would make it up to you for this whole mess of—"

"No, no. Don't think that, Wendy, and let's never make it a way of apologizing. We don't want it to be that. Uh, you mind if I open your photo up on my laptop again?"

"Might as well. You've seen about all I got, and really this isn't the first time."

"Yeah, I see it's an old photo now—no belly-button ring!"

"Yup. We did that not long before school was out last year, 'bout this time, in fact, a couple weeks before you guys came up for winter break. I mean, it was getting toward Christmas, our school break was coming up later that week, she and I were alone in her house, and she had this stupid body-paint kit in her closet. We weren't drunk or anything, just, you know, goofing around. I should have known better."

"You're really beautiful in the picture, though."

"Thanks, man. You know, the bottom was from one of Tambry's swimsuits, and we stuck, I think, cotton balls around the waist or some biz to make it look Christmassy. I don't even _have_ a two-piece."

"I like the candy cane."

Her voice got a little sultry: "Well—you know me, dude, I _love_ me some peppermint!" She giggled. That was their code for deep, soulful kissing.

"Wendy," Dipper said, "I'm gonna erase this from the computer. I hate to do it, but, you know—I shouldn't have it in the first place."

Quietly, Wendy said, "Thanks, man. That means a lot to me."

"I'll take it off my phone, too, right after we finish talking."

A long pause and then Wendy said, "You're a stand-up guy, Dipper. Betcha none of the other boys I used to hang out with would do that. Including Robbie!"

"It takes willpower, believe me," Dipper said.

"I miss you so much, Dip."

"Miss you, too, Lumberjack Girl. I'll see you the day after Christmas, though!"

"Yeah, I'm countin' the days, man. But I'm still gonna have some words with Tambry."

"Don't fight," Dipper advised. "Just tell her you're disappointed in her. And be sure to remind her you have her photo, too. Primo blackmail material, as Mabel says."

Wendy actually chuckled a little. "Yeah, I guess there's no good reason for me to punch her out. After all, with that crazy electron carpet, I was in your bod for a few hours and you were in mine! And after what happened at Moon Trap Pond and all—we got no secrets from each other, I guess, and we've been real good, haven't we?"

"Yeah, 'cause we're waiting," Dipper said. "Waiting until it'll mean something permanent."

"Yeah, but—gotta tell you, remember how you said you felt itchy that one time? I kinda have an itch myself! OK, tell you what. Providing there's not a heavy snow cover when you guys get up here for the Christmas break, and after Stan's and Ford's wedding and all, you and me will slip off and drive up to where the old covered bridge was and hike over to my favorite camping site, remember?"

"How could I forget?" Dipper asked, recalling the ghost town, the weird black-smoke creatures, the horrible toadlike monster, and the forlorn crumbling creature that was a man who could not die. "Sure, I remember it."

"OK, here's the deal: That bubbly hot spring, the natural hot tub, is under an overhang, remember, practically a cave. Even when the air's freezing, the water's nice and hot, and once you're in the water, it's real comfy. You and me, all by ourselves, will take a dip in it. I'll wear that red bathing suit you like."

"It'll be cold changing!" Dipper said.

"Nah, we'll build a fire for that. The cliff keeps most of the wind off, and with a fire it's not bad. I've done this before—never with a guy, though, just by myself when I needed some alone time to unwind and let the hot water soak out the tension! So—what do you say? Would you like me in that suit?"

"You know I would!"

Her voice took on a slyly wicked edge: "Then here's my condition: You bring a swimsuit for yourself, too."

"Well, yeah, I'll pack my trunks—"

"Uh-uh. You saw me in body paint. In return—I want to get you in a Speedo!"

* * *

Later, with a little inward pang, Dipper wiped both the computer and the phone, erasing the picture. Then he took the six Pixelshopped photos he'd hidden in his drawer and ripped them to jigsaw shreds, which he stuffed into a paper cup. He crushed the cup around the fragments and tossed it into his wastebasket. When he opened the door, Mabel was waiting outside, a grin on her face.

"Well?" she asked, her eyes wide and expectant. "Did you talk to her?"

"Yes," Dipper said. "It was all a mistake. Oh, and I have to go shopping."

"To get her a present?"

"In a way," Dipper said, wondering where the heck he could go to find a Speedo.

More seriously, Mabel asked, "So, um, how are you two? Is it all right now?"

Smiling, Dipper said, "Well, if it's not all right just yet—it will be, Sis. It soon will be."


	3. Chapter 3

**3\. Getting Malled**

 **(December 12-13, 2014)**

* * *

Christmas shopping was always a problem for Dipper. Well, for Mabel, too, but in her case, it was more a problem of "Oh, this is perfect for Mom! No, wait, that over there's better! Ew, I was mistaken . . . Look at this! Shiny! Nah, she'd hate it. How about this?" All the while she erratically rushed from aisle to aisle like a hummingbird high on Smile Dip.

In roughly half an hour she could reduce the clerks in a whole section of a department store to tears and sometimes to resigning from their positions. And every single potential gift that she saw, she had to try out, inspect, feel, shake, examine for color coordination, and so on and so on and so forth. Dipper's problem, in contrast, came sort of on the back end of the deal.

"I thought you had a present for Teek," Dipper had told Mabel on Friday afternoon. "Your photo, right?"

"Pffft!" Mabel said, spraying him a little. "Sure, that's my secret and private present to him, the glamour bit, but I gotta have _something_ to hand to him at the Shack! Are you gonna give Wendy a beefcake photo of yourself out in public?"

"No," Dipper said.

"Ah-hah! No, you'll give it to her when the two of you are all alone! My point exactly! You gotta let me take the _secret_ one, Brobro! You'll look like a dork posing in front of the mirror and taking a selfie!"

"I'm not giving her any photo of myself!" Dipper insisted. "Beefcake or whatever—"

"Lambchops!" Mabel chortled. "I'll bet she wants a—"

"What _ever!_ No photo!"

Dipper looked so huffed that Mabel apologized: "Aw, I'm sorry, Dip. What about if when we get there, I take a really good picture of the two of you posing together? Then you can each have one as, uh, a New Year's present!"

"Fully clothed," he said firmly.

"Well, yeah!" Mabel said. "It's cold in Gravity Falls this time of year. If I was unclad, I'd shiver and the picture would blur!"

That wasn't what Dipper had meant, but he'd learned long ago that, when Mabel was concerned, it was best to follow the advice in the song that the ice queen sang in the movie: Just . . . let it go.

However, Mabel said to him, Mom, and Dad, that on the next day she definitely wanted to go to the mall, and his parents replied that was fine as long as the kids stuck within a budget (Mom's condition) and that Dipper go with Mabel so they could get everything done at once, and for a change maybe Mabel wouldn't wind up having to be bailed out of Mall Jail (Dad's contribution).

Because that had happened a couple of times before, their parents had given up on "taking Mabel shopping." Now they simply "unleashed her on the stores," stationing themselves where she could find them only when she needed to put something on a credit card, or sometimes to be turned down for parental credit if the present were exceptionally costly.

And as often as not, the whole shopping expedition proved fruitless, anyhow. Mabel frequently wound up crafting all, or nearly all, of the presents she gave, though admittedly a lot of the time, something she spotted in the stores gave her inspiration for her own creations.

By contrast, Dipper was a slow and deliberate shopper. He believed in careful research and pre-shopping, and often he would determine some gift way in advance. For instance, back in September he had found in a magazine addressed mainly to law-enforcement professionals (don't ask why he was reading it) an advertisement for something called the Sesame Stack.

This was not a snack item, but rather a smallish rectangular black-leather sheath that looked as if it might contain a pair of standard USB memory sticks or maybe a small pocket knife. It actually held, in a neat nesting stack, three city rakes, two Bogota rakes, three hooks, three half-diamonds, and an assortment of tension wrenches.

In other words, it was practically the equivalent of the President's Key—a compact set of lock picks that could open (almost) every traditional, non-electronic lock in the country. It would be a perfect gift for Grunkle Stan. The trouble was that you couldn't walk into any old hardware store and purchase this little item. It had to be bought through a direct order from a law-enforcement professional.

Fortunately, Dipper knew one, and calling Deputy Durland and getting his permission to order the kit in the deputy's name was child's play. Of course, the company would ship only to a police station, but that wasn't difficult, either. The hard part was getting Durland to agree to forward the package to him in Piedmont, because the deputy had trouble spelling, and after Dipper patiently taught him to spell things like "Dipper" and "Piedmont" and "CA," Durland then remembered he couldn't write. Blubs helped him out, though, and it only took an extra week for the package to arrive. Dipper had already wrapped it and tagged it for Stanley.

However, for Wendy—and for Mabel, and Mom and Dad—Dipper usually surrendered to the annual ritual and traveled to the malls to look for something just right. Even so, he always checked online first, spotting possibilities, as he did that Friday evening.

* * *

The next morning, bright and sunny but at fifty degrees just a bit brisk for Piedmont, Dad and Mom dropped them off and set out to do some shopping of their own. "Stick together," Mom warned them.

So they immediately split up. While Mabel was running around a huge mall-anchoring department store trying to find something good as a public present for Teek O'Grady, Dipper made a beeline out into the mall and visited a smaller, brightly-lit, and considerably more elegant emporium. In fact, it was so elegant that as Dipper shopped, a pretty clerk in her twenties, brightly dressed in a white blouse, black skirt, and red jacket decorated with a faux holly sprig, came over to him and said kindly, "Young man, I think you might be in the wrong store. We don't sell costume jewelry."

"I . . . wasn't looking for that," Dipper said, feeling surprised. But then he realized that the other shoppers, men and women, were middle-aged or older and all dressed in style. He wasn't exactly sloppy, but in his sneakers, jeans, track-team jacket, and Wendy's fur trapper's hat, he looked at least a little out of place.

He felt very aware of the instrumental version of "White Christmas" playing on the mall sound system above the chatter and murmur of passing shoppers, but he held his ground and explained, "I'm sort of looking for the real thing. And these are very pretty." He pointed to some jewelry inside the glass case.

"Yes, they are," the clerk agreed gently. "But those gems are real. That necklace is $1250, and that's marked down from $1400 for our Christmas sale."

"Oh," Dipper said. "That _is_ a little out of my price range, all right. How about these on the second shelf, up at the front?"

"Not as expensive, but still not cheap," the clerk said. "Those are, let me see . . . sale price is $199, marked down from $225."

"And how about the bracelet?"

"The one with only three of the stones? That's a bargain at $175. The chain is 14-karat gold, and the stones are rather small, as you see."

"Yes, but it's still pretty," Dipper said. "Is that the sale price?"

"No, that item's already been reduced," she told him, shaking her head. "It's not included in our sale."

"Well. Thanks for taking this time with me," Dipper said.

"You're welcome, young man. Now, they sell nice costume jewelry at—"

"Excuse me," Dipper said. "Tell me this, please: If I bought these, could I also get the bracelet for $150 to go with them? They sort of match."

The clerk blinked. "What—oh, Uh. I—well, I can ask. Just a minute."

She went into a glass-walled office, and a tall, bald man in a Navy-blue blazer and a conservative blue-and-gray tie—not an old guy, just shaven-headed—listened to her, then glanced out and saw Dipper at the counter. He pushed back his chair and came out to the counter. "Hi," he said. "I'm the manager. Now, did you ask if you could have the bracelet for twenty-five dollars off—"

"If I bought it together with these," Dipper said, pointing.

"Hmm. Well—the bracelet _has_ been here for months and hasn't sold, and—" He tilted his head quizzically. "Excuse me, but are you Mason Pines from the high school in Piedmont?"

"Yes, but everybody calls me 'Dipper,'" he said, wondering how the manager knew him.

"I thought I recognized you. My nephew's on the track team with you," the manager told him, smiling. "Chuck Macavoy?"

"Oh, right!" Dipper said. "We call him 'Mac.' He's improved his form a lot, and he's gonna do great this year!"

"He tells me you're a good team captain," the bald guy said. "Oh, sorry, I'm Charles Macavoy. My little brother named his son after me!" They shook hands, and Macavoy went on, "I've seen you run in four or five meets. You're a fine sprinter. So, how's it look this year?"

"The JV? Pretty good, Mr. Macavoy. We've got some good freshmen in this fall—the girls' team's picked up more talented runners than ours has, but we've got some strong sophomores returning, and our guys are showing good running times at practice. I'm happy with our chances."

"That's great. Well. I don't see why we can't come to an agreement here. Will this be charge?"

"Uh, cash, actually," Dipper said. He opened his wallet. "What does it all come to?"

Macavoy rang up the sale. "All right, with tax, that will be $370.36."

Dipper counted out seven fifties, a twenty, and a one. "There you are."

"Gift wrapping is free," Macavoy told him.

"Uh—thanks, but I'd sort of like to wrap them myself," Dipper said. "But if you have a nice box—"

"We'll find one that's just right." Macavoy handed Dipper his loose change. "Why did you ask for the discount?" he asked.

Dripper grinned. "Well, it's for a girl. I mean, of course it is, but I'm sure you know that. That's her birthstone and—well, never mind. It's just that I have some shopping money saved up, and my mom sort of put limits on how much I can spend on anybody. I'm not supposed to spend more than four hundred dollars max on any one person, so I had to make sure the total would come in under that. Without the discount, it would be $405.79."

"Good calculating," Macavoy said with a chuckle. "Just a minute." He had the clerk find a classy little jewel box and then bagged the purchase. "Here you are, Dipper. Look for me in the stands when you're running at the local meets. And tell my nephew I said hi!"

"Sure thing," Dipper said. He walked out of the jewelry store smiling, but beginning to feel nervous. What if Wendy didn't like these? What if she thought they were too gaudy, or too expensive, or what if she wouldn't want to wear them when her dad and brothers could see them and ask about them? Or what if she thought her friends would make fun of her—the items were a little bit girly, but they were beautiful, but of course she was beautiful, too, and she _was_ a girl—

Dipper groaned. _This_ bit, this post-purchase uncertainty, was when he always suffered. For a moment he hesitated, wondering if he should just return the jewelry to the shop—but then he clenched his teeth and started back toward the department store instead.

 _But anyway, maybe I'd better save the receipt._ As he headed back to find Mabel, Dipper realized something: _Mabel and I aren't too different, except she agonizes BEFORE she finds a present. Mine all comes AFTER._

* * *

"No luck, Sis?" he asked half an hour later when he found her not in the department store, but out on the second floor of the mall near the food court.

Mabel was sitting at the counter of a Freezy Slush stand, on a stool smack beneath a hanging decoration of probably plastic mistletoe and consoling herself with a Suicide Special—every flavor they sold, mixed together in a tall cup. She must have done some shopping, because two big bags of stuff were on the floor beside the stool, but she looked woebegone. "I'm out of inspiration," she moaned, making the last of the drink rattle loudly in the straw. "What do you think, Dipper? What am I missing?"

Dipper sat on the stool next to her, after glancing up to make sure he wasn't under a sprig of the dangerous holiday stuff himself. "OK, let's think it through. Is Teek still interested in film making?"

Mabel smiled. "Huh, of course he is. Yeah. What, can I get him, like, an apprenticeship at a studio? Do you know somebody? Why didn't you tell me you had showbiz connections? Can you get me Kermit the Frog's autograph?"

"No, no, nothing like that," Dipper said hastily, wondering how much sugar was in a Freezy Slush. "I passed a camera store that's selling off last year's models because the new ones are all in—"

"I don't know what kind he'd like!" Mabel objected.

Dipper shrugged. "How about a digital movie camera that has a manual zoom and a macroscopic lens—you know that's both for distance action and extreme close-ups—and also has a setting for frame-by-frame exposure and time-lapse?"

Mabel gave him her frowny head-tilt of puzzlement. "What in the which with the who now?"

"He can do animation with it," Dipper explained.

Mabel's face turned pale. "Not clay! Not clay!"

"You can explain to him about that. So if he wants to get into animation, instead of clay, he can do animated cartoons, maybe—"

This time his sister did an air punch. "Yes! I can draw them!"

Dipper nodded, hoping she'd ride out the sugar high soon. "Good idea, good idea. Or he could do a time-lapse study of how a seed grows, that kind of thing. Anyway, listen! The camera sold for five hundred dollars, but in the store window I saw one they've marked down to $199."

"That's a lot of money," Mabel said slowly. "Howwww much did you spend on Wendy?"

"Um, the present I picked out was on sale, too, and it cost $199," Dipper said, very nearly truthfully. "Same as the camera would cost."

Mabel cackled. "Then Mom couldn't yell at me! Because if she did, she'd have to yell at you, too! And she never yells at you!"

That . . . wasn't absolutely true, but Dipper had to admit that Mom always gave him more leeway than she did Mabel—maybe because she knew Dipper wouldn't use much leeway even if he had it. "Listen," Mabel said, "big favor: could I borrow a hundred from you?"

"I guess," Dipper said. "Didn't you bring your shopping money?"

"Yeah, well, three hundred of it, anyhow," Mabel said. "But, you, know, I've bought a few things." She gestured at the two shopping bags on the floor.

"Not for Teek? Who are they for?"

"Oh, I looked at stuff for _so_ many people," Mabel sad with a casual shrug that made Dipper suspicious.

"So these are . . . things for you, am I right?" he asked.

Mabel bit her bottom lip. "Um—welllll, some of it. Craft stuff, you know."

"And you'll use that to make people presents, so it's not really selfish," Dipper said with a smile.

"Why can't Mom be as understanding as you, Brobro?" Mabel asked.

"'Cause she's the one who gives you your allowance," Dipper told her. "Come on, let's go check out that camera before they sell it to somebody else."

"Might as well," Mabel said with an irritable upward glance. "The darn mistletoe hasn't worked once!" And she hopped off the stool.

The camera salesman was helpful, explaining what the camera could and could not do. "The best feature is that it shoots HD," he told them. "That's important if you record for transfer to film. And it has a good built-in microphone, but it also has a jack for using a really high-quality one. USB transfer to the computer, so there's no need for a firewire. This is a fine mid-range camera—good normal movie making, and then, too, time-lapse and animation—single-frame exposure, that is—shooting is easy. Plus, if you should want to use it as a still camera, it has excellent resolution and you can get amazingly sharp enlargements up to 17 by 22, practically poster size."

"Wrap it up!" Mabel exclaimed.

Later on that day, reading up on the subject back at home, Dipper realized that Teek would need some computer software for editing, as well as a tripod, a cable shutter release, this, that, and the other—another two hundred dollars, at least.

Oh, well. If it would keep Mabel happy. He splurged and ordered online a package of accessories that Mabel could include to make Teek's gift complete.

* * *

"Money sure goes fast when you're having fun," Mabel complained that evening as she hung out in Dipper's room. She'd been subtracting what she'd spent from her gift budget, and the remainder was small. "What are we gonna do for Dad and Mom?"

"How about this for Mom?" Dipper asked, showing her something on his laptop screen.

"A little bitty computer?" Mabel asked, sitting beside him on his bed so she could peer at the laptop. "She uses Dad's!"

"Ah," Dipper said, "but this little tablet you can set up in the kitchen. Has a neat Bluetooth keyboard, see? And look what comes with it—this spiffy little wireless printer. It's compact and it only holds 25 sheets of paper, but it's handy."

"I don't see—"

"So you can make shopping lists right on the spot!" Dipper explained. "There's a great built-in app at no extra charge. You can even program the tablet to recognize the layout of your favorite stores, and no matter how you make out your list, it'll automatically arrange the items by aisle."

"Oh, man! So _organized_! She'd love it," Mabel admitted. "Um—I suppose it's also good for making lists of chores we have to do and junk like that?"

"Sure," Dipper said.

"Evil!" She sighed. "But you nailed Mom, all right. OK, what's the damage?"

"Give me half of what you have left," Dipper said. "I'll make up the difference."

Mabel gave him a fond smile. "Aw, Dip—thanks, Bro. I owe you a big one."

"No, it's OK. We're together on this, and I have more money left over than you do." That was true—he still had savings from the year before, when the twins unexpectedly got an enormous reward from a British insurance company for recovering an extremely rare stolen relic. Though most of it had gone into college savings accounts, they had a respectable amount left over just to spend any way they wanted. Over the past year, Mabel had spent about all of hers, while Dipper still had a healthy positive balance in his spending account. Dipper bookmarked the web page with the tablet and then typed in another web address. "Now, for Dad, I was thinking—what about these?"

"Huh," Mabel said, looking at the computer again. "Scale-model cars? Is Dad even interested in those?"

"He used to be," Dipper said. "When I was helping him take stuff downstairs from the attic for the move, he found a cardboard box full of plastic cars he'd built in college. They were pretty beat-up, though, and he trashed them, but he got nostalgic and told me how much he enjoyed making them and said he wished he'd taken better care of them."

"Isn't that one—?" Mabel asked with a grin, pointing to a model on the screen.

"Yeah, yeah, a 1973 Dodge Dart, Wendy's car. This one's tan, but you can paint them any color, even forest green. You know how much he flips out over Wendy's," Dipper said, blushing a little.

" _Now_ I get it. Softening the old Dadster up, huh? Getting him ready for when you break the news of your engagement, you sly dog!" Mabel said, nudging him. When Dipper squirmed, she took pity on him and asked, "OK, how many cars in the set?"

"Half a dozen," Dipper said. "Including two that he modeled in college. And these are higher-end than his plastic models were. I think he'll enjoy tinkering with them. See, he can have a little workroom in the new house—that space in the back of the garage that he won't use for lawn tools would be great. And he can display these in the new house's library."

"He _does_ like helping me with crafts," Mabel mused. "All right! Let's do it! Uh—same deal, I put up half of what I have left?"

"Same deal," Dipper told her with a smile.

"Aw. Awkward sibling hug?"

"Sure, why not?" Dipper said, chuckling.

They did the hug, did the pats, and then Mabel sighed. "I only regret one thing, Dipper."

"What's that?"

"Now," she said, "I wish I'd saved enough money to buy _you_ something!"


	4. Chapter 4

**4\. December Dreams**

 **(December 14, 2014)**

* * *

 **From the Journals of Dipper Pines:** _Sunday, December 14, 6:30 PM—Wendy called about twenty minutes ago for a facetime chat. It was earlier than our usual weekend phone visits, and she asked, "Am I interrupting anything? You guys having dinner already?"_

" _No," I told her. I was in my room, with my phone in my hand, on speaker, the volume turned down low enough so that even Mabel couldn't eavesdrop, and I was staring at my beautiful redheaded—OK, Mom and Dad don't read this, and Mabel if you do, don't tell—girlfriend. "It's OK," I assured her. "We never eat before seven."_

" _I know we usually touch bases around eight, but this is a special occasion. Got something to show you. I'm going outdoors. Let me turn on the porch light—there." She turned her phone away from her face and I saw darkness and then the porch pillars. She stepped down into the front yard of the Corduroy house. "See it?"_

" _Uh—what am I looking for?" I asked, staring at blackness with one or two shadowy shapes of trees dim in the picture._

 _She shifted the camera a little, so the glare from the porchlight came in diagonally from the right. "Look real close. You'll see it, I think."_

 _I leaned forward, squinting at the screen. Then I saw a swirl of white flakes. "Snow!" I said._

 _She chuckled. "Yep. Wait a second, I'm walking out to my car. Got a flashlight."_

" _It's way darker up there than it is here," I said. The sun had set a little before five o'clock in Piedmont, but, I reminded myself, Gravity Falls was about six hundred miles north of us—their sunset was twenty minutes or more before ours and, I guessed from the snow, they had a heavy cloud cover, too._

" _Here we go. Check it out!" Wendy shone the flashlight on the hood of her car. The dark-green metal wore a scattered frosting of snow, like powdered sugar sprinkled on a cake. "Not gonna do much, though. Flurries, but no accumulation, they say. Still, first snowfall of the year, dude!"_

" _We never get snow here," I told her._

" _Cold out here. I'm going back inside," she said. "Radio silence until I get to my room, OK?"_

" _Sure."_

 _The screen went dark as Wendy put the phone in her jacket pocket. So, I listened. I heard Manly Dan ask, "Supper on the stove?" and Wendy answer, "Beef stew in the slow cooker, Dad. We'll eat in like half an hour."_

 _Then she took the phone out again and clicked on a lamp. "Here we go, dude," she said, hopping onto her bed and leaning back against some pillows. I could make out the FALLOUT SHELTER sign she had filched from Ford's bunker hanging on the wall above her head. "OK, we're private. Now, what's up with you, Dip?"_

 _I shrugged. "Not a whole lot. Mabel and I are gearing up for Christmas, you know. Oh, and Hanukkah starts this Wednesday."_

" _Oh, yeah you guys celebrate that. You'll have to tell me about it!"_

 _I grinned. "Well, it's for Dad, really. We don't make a great big deal out of it. The main thing to remember is put the candles in right to left, light them left to right!"_

" _I want to hear about it. Festival of Lights or something?"_

" _Right. There's a whole backstory to it. I'll tell you when I see you. For Mabel, it's mainly an excuse to get eight presents in a row, but it's a tradition, you know? Like when we'd just turned thirteen, Mabel had a bat mitzvah and I had a bar mitzvah. Those are sort of coming-of-age ceremonies. Dad's Reform, as much as he's anything, so I had to write a paper on Jewish heritage and then give a little speech." I shrugged. "It starts, 'Today I am a man.' But nobody takes that literally, not even Dad, not Mom, and especially not Mabel!"_

" _Is there a lot of ritual?"_

" _Well—not really, no, 'cause Dad's not all that bound to tradition, but he thinks it's nice for us to connect now and then."_

" _Dude," Wendy said, yawning, "how are we gonna raise our kids?"_

" _Huh? You mean Jewish or—come to think of it, I don't even know what your family is!"_

" _Unitarian Ecumenical," she said. "Little church on Timberlane Road, I don't think you've ever been past it. Anyway, Dad takes us to church on Christmas and Easter and maybe four other times a year, not counting family weddings and funerals. Kinda nice, but real casual, you know."_

" _Sounds like Mom," I told her. "She's Episcopalian, and we go with her maybe once a month when we're home. I think both Dad and Mom are happy to let Mabel and me decide stuff like that. I mean, I kinda trust there's a higher power, and I think we ought to honor whatever force in the universe is good, and there are different ways and all. So, if we ever do have children, I'd say expose them to it all and let them choose."_

" _I'm totally on board with that. Don't hold the phone so far away, man. Let me take a close look at your face."_

 _I held the phone closer and tilted my bedside lamp to shine more fully on me. "It's just me," I said._

" _Yeah, but look at how grown-up you're looking! Bet most people would put you at seventeen! I think your chin's scruffy!"_

 _That embarrassed me a little. "Well—I'm shaving every other day now, but I haven't done it since last Thursday. Lazy weekend, you know."_

" _You goin' lumberjacky on me!" she said, laughing._

 _But now that I got a closer look at her—_

" _Wendy," I asked, "are you OK? You look kind of tired." In fact, she looked like me after one of those marathon all-night study sessions, after going without sleep for twenty-four hours: Dark circles under her eyes, eyelids droopy, face sort of tense and strained._

 _She gave me her lopsided smile. "Aw, it's nothing," she said. "Soos and Teek and me wound up work at the Shack last week and closed the place for the winter. From now on, I'm just dropping in twice a week for a couple hours at a time to help with maintenance and watching after Little Soos and junk. But that made it hectic, plus I had my college-extension finals, and I studied extra-hard for them and all. And we're having exams in high school this week. We don't get out until the nineteenth!"_

" _Bummer," I said. "We're out this Wednesday."_

" _Man, you guys are lucky! Guess we put in extra time so if there's snow days we don't have to go in the summer to make 'em up. Yeah, so like I was saying, what with all the studying and everything, I've been sleeping bad," Wendy said._

" _Take care of yourself," I told her. "We'll be flying up Christmas afternoon."_

" _Oh, I'll be up for that," she said with her old grin. "And then on the twenty-sixth the rehearsal and then on the twenty-seventh the big Pines double wedding! Hey, did I tell you where they finally decided to have it?"_

" _No, where?" The last I'd heard, Ford and Stan were wrangling over whether to have it in the Teen Center, the Town Hall, or some nondenominational church—that might even be the one Wendy had mentioned, I don't know._

" _The Shack!" Wendy said, laughing. "Soos was having, like, an aneurysm because he wanted so bad for them to do it there, but he didn't want to bug them about it. And finally, Stan says, 'What the heck, we technically own the joint!' And Ford said, 'A home wedding! Perfect!' Long story short, they're gonna do it in the parlor where Stan used to throw the dances and all. Dude, I don't know why they argued about it so much before deciding that. 'Cept they just plain love to argue."_

" _That's true," I told her. "Hey, Wendy, get to bed early, OK? Take care of yourself. You look stressed out."_

 _She smiled, but she still looked exhausted. "Well . . . really home life is easier on me. Tell you more about that when I see you. Oops, gotta go stir the stew. Be good, Big Dipper. Counting the days, man!"_

" _Me, too," I said. "Until then—think peppermint!"_

" _Mmmm," she said, licking her lips._

 _We have this deal of not saying "I love you" on the phone. Parents might overhear. Or Mabel, which in my case wouldn't be worse, but just more irritating. There's only so much booping a guy can take!_

 _After we hung up, I went to my window and looked out. Kind of a low pinkish glow where I could glimpse the western horizon over the roofs of the neighboring houses, but the sky was dark and cloudy, though not overcast. I can't remember any snow in Piedmont, not ever. Dad says when he was a little kid about an inch fell and stuck—but back then his family lived across the bay. Once or twice we've had blowing flakes, but nothing on the ground._

 _Snow in Gravity Falls, though, is common. They get an average of maybe forty inches a year, sometimes more! I started to daydream about a cold snowy day—everything soft and white outside, and so quiet! And a big warm fire roaring in the fireplace, and the sofa pulled up close to it, and me and my Lumberjack Girl snuggled up together under a fleecy throw . . .._

 _Aw, darn it. Mom just called us down to dinner. Good night, Magic Girl! I wish you sweet dreams._

* * *

 _Maybe I should have told him,_ Wendy thought as she hung up the phone and hauled herself off her bed to head for the kitchen. But then, _Nah. Probably just stress from all the studying._

The college part of that was over, anyway, and she was pretty sure she'd scored well in both of her night classes. She'd gone in with a good A average in College Algebra and an even stronger one in English 111, Academic Discourse—in fact her English teacher had suggested she test out of his class and into Comp II, Research and Writing, but Wendy had decided to stay on, not fully trusting herself to skip a class.

Grades would be posted sometime in the coming week, and—yes, she was antsy about them. She'd pegged a lot of her aspirations on how well she could tackle college classes. Oh, she knew she wouldn't fail, but—for the first time in her whole life—it meant so much to get an A and not a B! _This must be how Dipper feels all the time,_ she thought, knowing how much his mom pushed him.

True, the next semester made her a little apprehensive. She would be taking English 114 (Comp II: Research and Writing) and Biology 103 (Ecology), and other students had warned her both were tough courses—but then she'd just be applying what she'd learned in her first English class in one course, and she always did well in high-school biology, so now that the math prerequisite was out of the way ( _cross my fingers!_ ), she'd have a chance to explore a course that would fall within the field that she wanted to study.

Little bit daunting, she had to admit

However, worry about school wasn't the whole problem.

The dreams were worse.

As she stirred the pot of beef stew and chopped cabbage for boiling, Wendy kept fighting off a desire to close her eyes. Later, she knew, in her room she'd want to sleep—but maybe she wouldn't be able to. _Come on, girl! You're a Corduroy! Don't you think seventeen is a little old to start being afraid of boogeymen in the closet?_

Especially after some of the things she'd been through in waking life. Dreamed-up fears were nothing to Bill Cipher, who could suck the life out of you with a snap of his fingers and freeze you into a statue—or into a hanging banner, still dimly conscious of the fear inside but unable to move or even scream!

So—dreaming about a snake slithering across her bedroom floor shouldn't worry her. Heck, she wasn't afraid of _real_ snakes! Hanging out in the woods as much as she did, Wendy had encountered more than a fair share of buzzing Western Rattlesnakes. She even knew the scientific name, _Crotalus oreganus,_ the only venomous serpent species in the state. The biggest one she'd seen had been about three feet long—large enough to deliver a potentially fatal bite—but the ones she'd encountered didn't want to pick a fight, but just to be left alone. Only once had she been struck, back when she was about twelve, by a smallish rattler on a rocky hillside, and that one had merely hit her boot, its immature fangs not long enough to penetrate the leather. It had immediately retreated.

Other than that, she'd seen garter snakes and rat snakes aplenty, even the deceptively colored Mountain Kingsnake, whose yellow, black, and red markings closely approximated those of coral snakes—but coral snakes, relatives of cobras, only lived in southern Arizona and Texas and the Southeastern states. She'd handled kingsnakes often enough not to fear them.

But the, well, call it the Dreamsnake, was something different. She'd never had nightmares before—anxiety dreams, yes, but not full-bore boogey-boogey cheap-horror-flick nightmares. _Maybe it was having it out with Dad about not being the houseslave any longer,_ she thought. She'd had to steel her nerve about that—Manly Dan's temper was one thing that could scare her at times, though he'd never raised a hand against her. It was more the thought of the trouble he might get himself into that bothered her.

Maybe that was it. But ever since she'd forced an agreement that she would no longer have to do all the cooking and all the cleaning by herself, she'd begun to have flashes of disturbing dream imagery that gave her troubled sleep at best and woke her up at ungodly hours at worst.

And they centered on the Dreamsnake. . ..

 _Black as India ink, somehow oily, serpent-shaped but larger each time she glimpsed—or imagine she glimpsed—it, the vision glided out of her closet, beneath the closed door, and slowly circled her room. She could crack her eyelids and glimpse it by moonlight, sweeping, sinuous, somehow vaguely like a circling shark, and she sensed that it was waiting for something—_

But she never once saw it clearly—turning on the lamp vanished it, poof! like a magician's trick, and by the time she knew she was awake, Wendy doubted she'd ever seen it at all. A serpent that existed only in the mind's eye, maybe it was, like—well, like the diminished and evidently powerless Bill Cipher, now a wisp of a thought contained in what Dipper called the Mindscape.

Whatever, the Dreamsnake didn't _feel_ like Bill, not chaotic and malevolent, but simply . . . patiently evil, somehow. As if it bided its time.

"Oh, well," she told herself as she served up the stew and cabbage to her dad and brothers, "it'll ease off now that I'm not having such intense school time. And Dipper and Mabel are coming! Gotta look forward to that!"

But though she dished up a small bowl of stew for herself, and even ate it, Wendy had very little appetite.

Truth was—

Well, the truth was, she was starting to dread going to sleep.


	5. Chapter 5

**5\. Getting a Break**

 **(December 17, 2014)**

* * *

Somehow Wendy got through most of her high-school exams, though she thought she probably blew a couple of questions on the economics test. That was all right—that teacher counted the exam as only 10% of the grade, and it shouldn't pull her below an A minus even if she totally failed.

But . . . as the days passed, she felt woozier and woozier. She might be averaging only two hours of sleep every night, and fatigue was dragging on her.

The seniors finished all their exams on Wednesday and were released for Thursday and Friday. To Wendy's surprise, at the end of the school day on Wednesday, she got a summons to the principal's office. _Great, what do they think I've done?_ She'd pretty much toed the line since her freshman year when, admittedly, she, Nate, Lee, and Tambry had been behind some funny but pretty dumb pranks. They'd served detention time together more than once, sometimes with Tambry as a detention mate.

However, to her surprise, this time she got good news. Mrs. Flanagan, the counselor, was in the office waiting for her with the principal, and she said with a smile, "Well, Wendy, since you'll be a senior next term, and your English teacher has said you have an A average and may exempt the exam, the administration has decided you can take tomorrow and Friday off with the seniors."

Wendy stammered her thanks, feeling relieved despite her bone-deep sense of exhaustion. Then, driving home from school, she briefly closed her eyes and ran off on the shoulder of the road about half a mile from the Corduroy house. Cursing—she had picked up some colorful language from her dad and Grunkle Stan, who wasn't as careful around her as he had been with Dipper and Mabel—Wendy maneuvered back and forth until she could get her car out of the ditch.

At least the jolt had made her wake up. In the front yard she parked, got out, and knelt beside the passenger-side front tire to see if she'd damaged anything. The control arm had uprooted a clump of dry grass, which was stuck, but she pulled it loose and did both a visual and a finger-feel inspection. Nothing rattling, nothing bent, so there was that. Good. The next thing she wanted to do to the Dart was to replace the hood, which had a weak spot from, she didn't know, maybe a fire or something that happened before she bought the car.

Since she wanted original equipment as much as possible, that meant shopping junkyards for one that wasn't banged up or damaged, and that buying a good one would run into some money. Anyhow, her inspection showed her that momentarily dozing off and running off the road hadn't caused any costly damage.

She yawned until her jaws creaked and went inside. Her brothers weren't home yet—they rode the bus—and her dad was out on a tree-removal job for a guy whose yard had suffered some storm damage a couple of weeks earlier, so she sacked out on the living-room loveseat (where her younger brothers always parked themselves to play video games) and went to sleep immediately.

The position she had taken couldn't be called comfortable—lying sprawled face-down on the sofa with her head tucked into the space at the back on one arm, her long legs bent and her shins resting on the other arm. Even so, she fell straight into a deep sleep, partially making up for hours she'd lost because of scary dreams.

And it seemed like no more than five peaceful minutes passed before Manly Dan bellowed, "Wendy! You're too big for naps!"

"Jeeze, Dad!" she complained, struggling to roll over and swing her legs around. "You scared me!"

"Where are the boys?"

She reached to the floor to retrieve her trapper's hat. "Dunno. They not back?"

"If they was back, would I be askin'?" Dan grumbled.

"Let me check, let me check." Wendy fished her phone out, and sure enough, she had a text from them: "Gone to Arcade with friends." She showed that to Dan.

"Call 'em and tell 'em to get their butts home! It's after dark!"

Wendy did, but then she said, "Dad, they need a ride. You go pick 'em up?"

"I got ta shower!" he roared. " _You_ go get 'em!"

"Hey, it's not my fault they messed around and didn't take the bus home!" Wendy said hotly. "Why do I have to—"

"'Cause I said so! I done a day's work, girl! Do like I tell you!"

"You don't have a broken leg!" Wendy snapped irritably. "What time is it?" She looked at her phone. 6:18. She'd snatched almost, but not quite, three hours of sleep. "OK, I'll go, but I can't do that and cook dinner, too. Pizza or burgers?"

"Burgers. They been eatin' too much pizza!" The boys might be lactose intolerant or maybe not, but cheese always made them both loud and smelly.

"Then give me some money."

Dan grumbled but counted out a couple of twenties. As she got into her coat and headed out, he called, "Keep whatever's left over for walkin' around. Oh, hey, you got a letter!"

Wendy paused with her hand on the door handle. "Who from?"

"Don't matter! Read it after you get back!"

She sighed. "OK, two Fat Bombs for you?"

"Yeah, an' Mega Fries!"

"Got it."

She drove to the arcade, picked up the boys, and called in an order to Yumberjacks: her dad's Gargantuan order, plus a Smokey Burn (hamburger with smoked paprika and jalapenos) for one twin, a Jumpin' Catfish (fish sandwich) for the other, and a small regular burger for herself. A communal Bucket o' Fries for the whole family.

When she got home, the boys ran the food in. She had no more stepped through the front door before Dan yelled at her: "Nearly forgot! Bullets McCree gave me forty pounds of venison from deer he dressed out! You need to move it to the freezer before you eat!"

Wendy made a face. She couldn't stand venison, but Roadkill County had a complement of enthusiastic hunters, most of them friends with her dad. Dan regularly was gifted with surplus venison and she always wound up having to cook it. The wrapped cuts of meat had been packed in the back of Dan's truck in a too-small cooler with the plastic lid ajar, but the temperature was near freezing, so that was OK, as long as no bear, up past his hibernation time, had caught scent of the meat. Wendy lugged it in, making a mental note to wash out the cooler.

She packed the meat in the freezer, wishing Soos were here to help—though Stan had always left stuff in the gift shop after the Shack's seasonal closing, settling for a once-monthly dusting, Soos insisted on a clean sweep for the off season, storing everything including the display racks away in the storage room where the wax dummies had once stood, and he had a real genius for Tetris-ing the stuff in so everything fit. Wendy had to pull packages this way and that for fifteen minutes before she finally got the venison in. Then she took the empty cooler to the back porch.

Finally, she settled in to eat her small burger, which was cold (no fries left in the cardboard bucket for her)—and clean up after the guys, who'd left a mess on the table, from crumbs and spilled mustard and ketchup to dirty dishes when, doggone it, there was no need for dishes with burgers and fries! Glasses for their sodas, yes, but the dishes were just extra work.

However, she stacked them in the dishwasher—she had loaded it and done the dishes after breakfast that morning and had unloaded it just before leaving for high school—so at least there was room. They didn't fill the machine, so she gave them a preliminary rinse and left it at that. Then she hauled hot water out to the porch and washed and rinsed the cooler before carrying it back out to the truck.

When she came back in, Manly Dan was parked on the loveseat watching "Survivalist: Central Park" on TV, the saga of a dozen hillbillies turned loose in the middle of Manhattan and challenged to survive by fashioning clothes out of discarded plastic shopping bags and by preying on pigeons. He thought it was a comedy.

"Dad, you said I got a letter?" she asked, leaning on the back of the loveseat.

He glanced around. "Huh? Oh, yeah. I put it up for you. Where'd I put it? Let me see. Check on the counter next to the fridge."

"Not there," she called from the kitchen.

"Huh. Go look in my bedroom. Mighta left it in my jeans."

He hadn't, but she spotted it on the floor beside the bed, where he'd tossed his dirty clothes. Sighing, she picked the jeans, flannel shirt, and long underwear up and moved them to the hamper. Then she retrieved the envelope and saw the return address: It was from the Cordell Junior College Registrar's office.

She took a deep breath, went to the kitchen, sat at the table, and tore the envelope open. A single sheet of paper came out, folded once, and she took an apprehensive look at it:

* * *

 _ **Cardell Junior College Office of the Registrar: Grade Report**_

 **Student:** Wendy B. Corduroy / **Student Number** WBC9706213933

 **Status:** 5-c

 **NOTICE:** The information contained herein is subject to FERPA rules. It is provided only for the recipient. It is against the law for individuals other than the student named above to access, distribute, or disseminate the information herein contained, and doing so shall make such individuals subject to legal penalty. A duplicate of this grade report may legally be made to the appropriate offices of associated educational institutions.

 **TERM** : Fall 2014 (F) / **COURSE 1** : MAT 101 COL ALG – GRADE-4.0 CRED EARNED-3

 **COURSE 2:** ENG 111 COMP I—GRADE-4.0 CRED EARNED-3

Total Credits Earned: 6.0

 **GPA:** 4.0

 **COMMENTS:** DEANS LIST PTS

* * *

"Ha! Yes!" Wendy said. She remembered that the status, 5-c, meant that she was a part-time student, joint enrollment. But, man, she'd made two A's and was on the Dean's List—well, the list for part-time students, anyway! And that biz about the duplicate grade report meant the high school must have received a copy—and that was why she'd been cut loose, along with the seniors!

Good news at last.

She bounced up and went into the living room. "Hey, Dad, guess what? I'm on the Dean's List!"

Without looking around from the TV, Dan grumbled, "What'd you do to get in trouble?"

"It's a _good_ list, not a _shit_ list!" she said.

He roared: "Watch that potty mouth!"

"Dad, it's an honor! I got two A's—in _college_ , man!"

"See," Dan said, "you can work hard if you put your mind to it."

"Well," she mumbled in an angry undertone, " _I'm_ proud of me, anyhow."

She went back to the kitchen, laid the report on the table, and took a photo of it, then texted it to Dipper, along with a message:

* * *

 _Check it out! Not too shabby for a girl who once flunked two high-school classes, huh? I know you'll be happy for me. When you get here, we'll celebrate, OK?"_

* * *

And not five seconds later, the phone chimed, and it was Dipper, grinning at her from the screen and giving her a thumbs-up. She said, "Hang on. Let me go somewhere private."

She headed for her room, but paused on the threshold. For some reason the bedroom seemed oddly . . . hostile. Just because she'd lost sleep, she supposed. Anyway, instead of going inside, she went out the back door, around the house, and quietly got into her car, out of the wind but huddling in the driver's seat against the chill. Then she and Dipper had a long conversation, and a cheerful one, about how well she had done in school.

When they finished, it was nearly nine. _Well,_ Wendy thought as she put away her phone, _I got six hours of college credit, anyhow. Nobody can take that away from me!_

She got out in the dark—it was even colder, with a fitful, biting wind rattling the pines, and she hadn't bothered with her jacket—and hunched down in her green-plaid flannel shirt, she started back around the house, intending to enter quietly by the back door. Her brothers would be in their room, intent on some video game, and her dad would be glued to that TV set in the living room until eleven. She didn't want to explain why she'd gone out, or who she'd been talking to.

As she crunched through dry leaves on the kitchen side of the house, she became aware that in the darkness ahead something stood in her way—an animal or a person, or if Mabel was right, maybe five Gnomes all in a pile. "Shoo!" she said irritably.

Then from the darkness came a voice so familiar it made her spine tingle: "Don't sleep in your room tonight. There's something nasty in there. Get Pine Tree up here as soon as you can. You need help, Red!"

"Cipher?" she asked, her voice shaky.

No answer, and when she took a few steps forward, no one was there—no one, no animal, nothing. It was as if whoever, whatever, had dissolved into air. Or maybe as though her sleep-deprived brain had conjured up a hallucination.

She stood indecisive in the cold and the dark for a few minutes, apprehensive, angry, puzzled—and missing Dipper. Not sleep in her own room? Something nasty? What could that mean?

The freezing wind made her shiver.

"Hell with it," she snarled at last and went back inside.


	6. Chapter 6

**6: Timber**

* * *

 **(December 20, 2014)**

Saturday morning, and no school! Dipper woke, wondering why it was still dark out—not even 7:00—and just started to settle back on the pillow when his phone rang again, a tune on guitar and recorder, Wendy's ID tone. He snatched the phone from the bedside table, unplugged it from the charger, and said, "Hi, Lumberjack Girl!"

"Guess again," rattled a man's harsh voice.

" _Grunkle Stan_?" Dipper asked, nearly dropping the phone. He sat on the edge of his bed. "Who—why—what—?"

"When and where! Jeeze, kid! Just listen up! Wendy loaned me her phone. She's in the hospital room with her dad. She wanted me to step out and call you, catch you up."

"Wait, what? Room?" Dipper asked. "What—what happened? Is she OK? Room?"

Grunkle Stan impatiently repeated himself: "Hospital room! Real early this morning, Dan went out to some bozo's place where he'd started cuttin' down some storm-damaged trees to try and finish up the work, and before six o'clock, I mean before daylight, even, boom! One of 'em just fell, and he didn't even cut it, but the roots tore right outa the ground, and the trunk landed on top of him!"

Dipper wondered _What does that mean for me and Wendy?_ and immediately pushed away the selfish thought. He asked, "Is he OK?"

"Not right now, his leg's broke! But _will_ he be OK, you mean? Yeah. Probably," Stan said. "Dan's a tough SOB. Uh, Dipper, that means 'strong old boy—'"

Dipper was running a hand through his sleep-tangled hair. "I _know_ what it means!"

"Oh, well. Shame on you. Anywho, like I say, Dan's leg's busted, there's some medical term for it I don't know, but it's not the worst kinda break, anyways. Dr. Le Fievre took X-rays, and he's callin' in a medic-evac helicopter to fly him up to the Morris hospital, where they're better equipped to deal with this stuff, but he's stablilizin' Dan or something right now until it can get here, I mean givin' him pain meds and all." Stan's voice dropped: "Dip, is there any way you can come up here any sooner than Christmas? I mean, like _today_? I think Wendy needs you bad. I got Ford's laptop here, and I can finalize a flight if you can make it."

Dipper's heart was racing. "I—yeah, sure, school's out, and, uh, I—I'll have to ask Mom and Dad—"

"They up already?"

"Maybe. It's, uh, 6:40. Dad likes to go for his run at seven, and Mom always gets up to make coffee for him and then breakfast when he gets back. Wait and I'll go downstairs and see." Dipper hurriedly tugged on his jeans and then, barefoot and carrying his phone, he took the stairs down, two at a time.

"Mabel!" his mom yelled from the kitchen. "No running in the house!"

"It's me," Dipper said, stopping in the kitchen doorway, the linoleum cold under his bare feet. Dad, in a yellow long-sleeved polo shirt, was sitting at the table, holding his cup, and Mom, in her pink bathrobe, was about to pour coffee. Dipper swallowed hard. "Listen, this is urgent. I have to go to Gravity Falls today!"

" _What_?" Mom asked, sounding shocked. "Don't be ridiculous—"

"Whoa! Coffee, hon!" Dad said. She had filled his cup to brimming and the overflow dripped onto the table.

"Lemme talk to her," Stan's voice said, loud enough for Dipper to hear.

"Uh, here, this is Grunkle Stanley," Dipper said. "He'll, uh, he'll explain! I'll clean this up!" He grabbed a handful of paper towels and started to swab the spilled coffee.

Mom spoke into his phone: "Hello, Uncle Stanley, is something wrong? Uh-huh. Oh, no! Is he going to be all right? Yes, of course I remember her—well, I can understand! Of course, she'll need lots of help! The poor dear."

"What?" Dad asked.

Mom made a shushing motion. "What? Say that again? Well—well, yes, I guess so. Eight o'clock? Yes—I can get him there by then. What flight? Let me write that down." She looked at Dad and said, "Pen," and he fished one from the pocket of his polo shirt. She wrote on a paper towel: _Coastal Air, 1123._ "What will he need? No, no, don't worry about those things. We'll bring all that at Christmas. Just clothes to last until next Thursday, then. Yes, us too. Thank you, Uncle Stanley."

"What?" Dad asked. "What did he say?"

"That was your uncle Stanley," she said to her husband.

"I gathered that! But what's the trouble?"

Mom handed the phone back to Dipper, who set it down on the corner of the table. "The father of one of Dipper's friends is in the hospital up in Gravity Falls. She's all alone and scared and Stanley says she desperately needs help. Stanley tells me she doesn't have many friends, and she likes and trusts Dipper. We're going to send him up today so he can help her out."

Dad spooned and slurped some of the coffee so he could pick up his cup and drink. "Who? What friend are we talking about here?"

"Wendy," Dipper and Mom said together. Then Mom added, "Wendy Corduroy. You remember, she has red—"

"I remember!" Dad looked troubled. "Wendy! Oh, well, sure, he should go! Mason, tell Wendy that if there's anything she needs, anything at all we can do—"

"Yes, I will," Dipper said. "I, uh, I'd better hurry and pack."

"Lightly, dear!" Mom warned him. "Just enough clothing to last until next week. We'll bring up all your presents and the clothes you'll need for break when we come up on Christmas day! Oh, and a coat! It's cold up there, so pack your thick coat!"

"We could even ship the presents," Dad said. "That'd be cheaper than paying for them as luggage."

"I'll just pack the necessities," Dipper said, and he ran back upstairs. He opened Mabel's door and flicked on the light. She was lying on her side with her arms hugging a pillow. "Mabel!"

"Mmpf, please, no more kissing, Teek! My tongue's all dry!"

Dipper shook her from her dream. "Mabel!"

"Huh? What? Is it crazy early? Where's Teek? It's so dark outside! Why is my pillow so wet?"

"Listen," Dipper said urgently. "It's an emergency!" He told her all he knew, which didn't take long.

"Oh, man!" she said, sitting up in bed. "Mr. Corduroy's in the hospital? And so, what, Wendy's gonna be stuck with her bratty brothers? Yeah, Dip, you gotta go. Wait, she didn't want _me_?"

"I'm not sure she even wants _me_ ," Dipper said. "But Grunkle Stan really thinks I ought to go. He's arranging for a flight. I gotta pack, Sis. I'll see you when you come up next week!"

"Call me when you get there and let me know what's going on!" she said. "And text and junk and keep me in the loop, OK?"

"Yeah, I will!" He turned out her light, went to his room, and grabbed his duffel bag. He tossed in three pairs of jeans, four pairs of underclothes, socks, and four of his warmest long-sleeved shirts. And he crushed the trapper's hat that he had swapped Wendy for back in August into the bag, too. Then he quickly got dressed—he figured he could do without a shower, and he'd shaved the morning before, so his chin wasn't too stubbly—and finished by tossing a few toiletries, toothpaste and deodorant and so on, into the side pocket of the duffel.

He pulled on his shoes and got his heaviest jacket, the one he'd worn the previous year when he and Mabel had gone up to Oregon for Christmas break—and tried it on. It was short in the sleeves now, but it zipped. Barely, and tightly. His chest and shoulders were bigger. Dipper made some effort at brushing his unruly hair and then hurried downstairs.

Mom had already changed into jeans, long-sleeved blue top, and short jacket. "Let me look at you. All right, I suppose that will have to do. Here." She handed him a baggie. "All toiletries in this, and they have to be under three ounces, remember!"

Dipper scrambled them out. They were all within airline weight rules, so he stuffed them in the bag, then stuffed the bag back into the side pocket of the duffel. "Let's go."

"You haven't eaten anything!"

"Mom, no time, OK?"

"You get some breakfast at the airport, young man!"

"I will. Where's my phone?"

"Right there where you left it!"

It was on the corner of the table, though Dipper didn't remember leaving it there. He grabbed it, poured himself half a cup of coffee, and gulped it down. Dad, coming downstairs in gray hoodie and jogging pants and running shoes, said, "Hang on, champ. Here's some expense money." He handed Dipper a folded wad of twenties—seven of them—and one ten.

"This is a lot!" Dipper said.

"Well, call it an advance," Dad said, grinning. "You can pay me back when your book check comes in."

Book check. Oh, yes, just yesterday Dipper had heard from the editor who wanted to publish his first novel, _Bride of the Zombie._ He had texted a happy note to Wendy about it about eighteen hours earlier—and now—

"Thanks, Dad," Dipper said. He impulsively hugged his father, who gave him an awkward parental pat on the back.

Mom said, "You phone us! Oh—your charging cord?"

"There's plenty of them in the Shack," Dipper said. He glanced at the clock: 6:57. "Soos keeps forgetting he bought one and buys another and another. He and I have the same phone, so—come on, let's go!"

"We'll get there way early! I wish you'd eat something, but if you're that anxious, come on and I'll drive you," Mom said. "Is Mabel awake?"

Dipper hefted his duffel. "Uh, yes, I think so—"

Mom shook her head. "Never mind, it would take her too long to get ready. Dear, be sure to check on Mabel when you get back from your run. Don't let her have too much sugar at breakfast! Dipper, come along!"

Early on a Saturday morning, the drive south to the airport on I-880 took less than twenty minutes. Mom went with him to the Coastal Airlines check-in counter, where a clerk looked up his name on the computer. "Yes, here's the reservation. I'll need a photo ID," he said.

All Dipper had was his school ID, but the clerk accepted that. "How old are you?" the man asked, handing it back.

"Fifteen," Dipper said.

"All right, you won't be classified as an unaccompanied child." The clerk turned to Mrs. Pines. "Are you his guardian?"

"I'm his mother," Mom said.

The clerk tapped in some information on the computer, printed out a sheet, and handed it to her. "You'll need to sign this. I've put in the ticket number, form of identification, and so on. This is an indemnity form required for minors flying alone. Will you be checking luggage?"

"I only have my duffel bag," Dipper said.

"That's carry-on," the clerk said, with a glance. He took back the signed form and went back to the computer. "Let me see. There's just one first-class seat left: 5B, aisle seat."

"That's fine."

The printer rattled out his ticket and boarding pass. "Security is that way," the clerk said, pointing. "Mrs. Pines, you won't be able to go to the gate with him."

"Thank you." Mom suddenly turned and hugged Dipper. She pushed him away and said, "I'm not sure I understand all this, but—well, if you can help that poor girl in any way, I trust you to do it."

"Thanks, Mom," Dipper said. "I'll do my best. Hey, have Mabel pack my laptop for when you guys come up, OK?"

His mother nodded. "You're getting to be a young man," she said with a teary smile, ruffling his hair. "Not my baby any longer." She put her hand on his face. "And you could use a shave," she added. "My baby boy."

"Well, I'm still your boy, and I still love you," Dipper said. "I'll buy a disposable razor up there and tidy up as soon as I can."

"Good, good, and—I love you, too, Dipper," she said. "We don't tell each other that very often, do we? Maybe we should. Be safe! And you've got lots of time, so go have some breakfast!"

They parted, Dipper made it through Security, and he got his shoes back on and headed for Gate 18, Terminal 1. He passed a Starbucks and stopped for a latte and a cranberry-orange scone—he didn't think he could keep down anything heavier, and even the scone made his stomach queasy. He hurried on to the gate, got there at 7:29, and discovered the flight wouldn't begin to load for another hour. He settled in near the boarding doors and tried Wendy's number.

His Grunkle Stan answered. "Yeah?"

"Hi, this is Dipper," he said.

"How'd it go with the folks?"

"I'm at the airport. Supposed to land in Portland at—" he looked at his ticket—"at 11:15. How's Wendy?"

"She rode off in the helicopter with Dan. She forgot to get her phone back, I guess, and I didn't think about it, just stuck it in my side pocket. Hey, why's it ring that old Sylvia song when you call? 'Pillow Talk.' Heh. I remember dancin' with Carla McCorkle to that. Kind of a sexy ring tone, ain't it?"

"I—I don't know the song," Dipper said, his face feeling hot. "Look, is Wendy gonna come back to Gravity Falls or—"

"Kid! Listen, listen," Stan said. "Ford's gonna leave in about twenty minutes to drive over to Portland and pick you up. I'm gonna drive to Morris in a few minutes. By the time I get there, they'll prob'ly have Dan in a room and all, or if they decide they need to do surgery, he'll be prepping for that or some deal. I or Wendy'll call you and check in, unless you're already on the plane. What time's takeoff?"

"Uh . . . 9:10."

"OK, I'll be in Morris inside of forty minutes, so there'll prob'ly be plenty of time. I'll find Wendy, let her know you're comin' up, and give her phone back to her. You gotta be good to her, Dip. I've never seen her like this. She's almost comin' apart at the seams."

"Uh, how about her brothers?"

"Takin' 'em with me. Their aunt Sallie lives up there close to Morris somewheres, and she says she'll take care of them. She wants Dan to come stay at her place for a few weeks when he's out of the hospital, too, but he's real thick-skulled about crap like that. I'm gonna see if I can encourage him to go, if I get the chance. The boys can go to school temporary in Morris, and until they all get back, Wendy can bunk in at the Shack, keep her from bein' out in the woods all by herself. That's if Dan agrees. Maybe between his sister Sallie, Wendy, and me, we can talk some sense into him."

"Good luck."

"Yeah, you too. Gonna go now. If you don't hear from me or Wendy before you take off, first look for Ford at the Portland airport, and then when you're in the car, call me. Don't call Wendy first, call me on my phone, OK?"

"OK."

His mind boiled with so many questions—but he had no time to ask them. Waiting only made him more nervous. He sat jiggling his right foot, his heel tapping the light-and-dark-gray checkerboard pattern airport carpet, a muffled drumbeat of impatience. The scone rode heavy as a brick in his stomach.

The sun had come up, and through the windows he could see San Francisco Bay, the water invisible under a thick layer of low surface fog that soon gleamed pearl-white under the brightening sky. All around, at different gates, people boarded planes and the planes took off. Dipper kept willing the time to pass—and it did, but it didn't speed up one tick for him.

Then at 8:25 his phone rang again—"I Will Always Believe in Fairy Tales," his own composition, Wendy's ring tone. Cautiously, half-expecting Grunkle Stan again, said, "Hello?"

"Dipper." Wendy's voice, sounding washed out and weary. "Man, thank you so much for comin' up. I caused all this." She sounded as if she were crying: "I am so sorry."

"Hey, no, no," he said. "I want to see you as soon as possible! Maybe we can have some alone time, if your dad's doing OK."

"Mm. He's in surgery now. Has to have, like, a rod implanted in his—what was it? Tibia? Wait, they gave me a sheet—here it is. Intermedullary nailing."

Dipper winced. It sounded brutal. "So, he's gonna be OK?" he asked.

"Yeah, it's not all that bad if he'll just have the sense to do what the doctors tell him and not try to get back on that leg too soon. They're guessing eight to twelve weeks in a cast, then a brace and some rehab, and six months until he can go out in the field again. My Aunt Sallie is insisting he's gonna stay with her until he can hobble around again. Dad's real worried about missing so much work."

"If he needs money—"

"No, no, we have savings, we'll be OK. What I'm thinking, is Junior will come back home temporarily and take over the logging and the carpentry for six months. Gotta talk to him, but I think he'll do that. He's got no head for business, but Dad will take care of the paperwork and accounting and all, he can do that mostly from home. That'll keep the business going, anyhow. Dad's gonna have some houses to build, too, but that won't start, really, until summer, so that's probably what he should take on first in May or June—not as much strain as lumberjackin', and Junior can stay in Gravity Falls until Dad's fit again."

The clerk at the counter of Gate 18 announced that boarding for flight 1123 to Portland would begin in just a moment, first with passengers needing extra help or those with babies. "I'm going to have to get on the plane," he said. "I guess Grunkle Ford will drive me to Morris first, so I'll see you there. I'll, uh, I'll buy some peppermints."

She laughed, though even that sounded teary, too. "Listen," she said, whispering, "uh, Dipper? I got a real wild request. Don't take it the wrong way, and I'll explain all about it when I see you in private. But I expect tonight after I get the boys established with Aunt Sallie, I'll go back to Gravity Falls. Dad won't get out of the hospital for like four or five days, minimum. So tonight, I'll be alone, all on my own. Dipper—listen, don't make more of this than it is, OK—but—just for tonight—Dipper, will you sleep with me?"


	7. Chapter 7

**Chapter 7: In the Shadows**

* * *

The dark had no mind.

Yet dire thoughts swirled within it.

The dark had no eyes.

Yet it saw possibilities.

The dark had no mouth, no stomach.

Yet it hungered.

* * *

The ice-cool girl, good, that one was found. What did a pine tree mean? A broken heart? A rainbow attached to a star?

All the others . . . .

Potential power, certainly. Untapped.

Fun fact: Power is amoral. It does not care if it serves good or evil.

 _Almost within my reach. Where is she, where is she? She has not slept within range for too long now, for a whole night now, despite my doing her a favor._

It's not nice to disregard favors.

Even if you don't know you've been done one, yet.

So waiting was all, for the moment.

And whilst waiting, one could study. The infamous _Libro Obientia_ offered spells of thralldom, compulsion, and, most delicious of all, corruption. Turning a victim into a servant preserved all the power. True, such magics took the practitioner to the very razor-edge of sanity and risked body and soul in the mastering . . . but the rewards promised to be so sweet.

And he owned an even stranger book, Felder's _Schattenweisheit verfluchter Bilder_. Even the Vatican lacked a copy in its library of _Librorum Prohibitorum;_ it had once possessed an example, one of the 1666 first German edition, but in the 1800s a priest-librarian had destroyed it by fire and then had stabbed out his own eyes before descending into gibbering madness.

The German book offered a guide to arcane, secret, and quite certainly dangerous magical imagery, some of the illustrations so dangerous that they had been broken up, printed on three successive pages so it was not possible to view the entire figure at once. To do so was to offer up one's soul to forces and powers beyond the knowledge or understanding of humanity.

Oddly, the researcher did not even think of one book in his library of strange and evil sorcery. It was just a slim little volume, after all: the _Livre des Chiffres_ , not even all that rare, a product of the 1890s French _fin du siècle_ Decadent movement. The author, Theophile Desjardines, had been a minor poet, a loner, with no ties and no major publications. His last book, a mere sixty pages, had been self-published in an edition of about a thousand. It was not unusual to stumble across a copy if one browsed the old-book stores of Paris. They generally sold for a few Euros, depending on wear and tear. Not many were worn or torn, because not many people had the patience to read through sixty pages of gibberish.

It had never been translated into English.

If it had, the title would have been _The Book of Ciphers_.

Wait. Let's be more accurate, translating the title not literally, but in the spirit in which the author intended it to be understood.

 _The book of Cipher's._

Oh, yes. Much better . . . .

* * *

 _No one was home in the Corduroy house. The night before, the girl, the target, had slept in the living room, on a sofa. The frustrated Bearer had flashed (a black flash, not one of light), and had made one of her thoughts materialize._

 _That had not brought her back._

 _With the windows unshaded, the room held too much light for the Bearer to prowl, though it had built up enough strength (leached from her mind) to feel restless, insomuch as an insensate thing could feel._

 _Wait for her return._

 _Oh, wait for her return!_

 _Wait._

 _Wait._

 _Wait for . . . tonight. . . ._


	8. Chapter 8

**Chapter 8: What's the Trouble?**

* * *

Unlike Mabel and Grunkle Stan, Dipper neither feared flying nor found it nauseating. But then, he didn't have acrophobia, and he'd never been much bothered by motion sickness. He resembled Ford in those respects.

It wasn't a very long flight—a straight shot, two hours. He wished he'd thought to bring a book—his new Journal, which he'd begun the day after his fifteenth birthday, even, though its entries were on the mundane side. Except—except for that strange bit about the Halloween costume that might have been haunted and the strange girl (ghost?) with whom he'd danced at the school costume ball . . . there seemed to be more to the whole story than he could remember—but then he couldn't remember what he might have forgotten.

Instead of puzzling about that, Dipper immersed himself in the magazine. It had a simple-minded crossword puzzle (1 Across: A Swiss standing alone?), which took up nearly a quarter of an hour of the flight. First-class passengers had a light breakfast if they wanted it, which he didn't, but he did drink a small container of cranberry juice.

He read a short article, "Keep Portland Weird!" but the weirdness was of the independent, eccentric, aging-hippie variety, not Gravity Falls weird. The article mentioned the Naked Bike Ride (Dipper reflected that Mabel's recent focus on nudism—she kept making jokes—might be a good sign to keep her away from Portland if the ride reoccurred the next summer), a Voodoo Doughnut Shop, "yarn bombing" (the practice of wrapping public art and even lamp posts in yards of colorful yarn—another reason to keep Mabel away, because though the locals seemed amused by the practice, she'd likely land in jail after yarn-wrapping the mayor or something), and a few other strangenesses.

Dipper remembered that Melody had lived in Portland for years and understood how she had adapted so easily to married life with Soos in Gravity Falls. Portland was like the vaccination. The peculiar weirdness of Gravity Falls was the virus.

Wait, wait—Wendy had told him at least once that she wanted to live in Portland. But then nothing fazed Wendy.

Well—up to now.

 _Sleep_ with her?

No, they'd promised each other to wait until he was, at least theoretically, an adult. So it couldn't be that—

 _Sleep_ with her?

Oh, man.

* * *

Because of tail winds or a crook in the Jet Stream or something, they angled down for a landing in Portland at 10:51. Through the porthole on the other side of the thin, immaculately dressed woman who was his seatmate, Dipper glimpsed the gleaming Columbia River, then the straight lines of the runways. A few moments later, they touched down and taxied to gate C-13.

One advantage (and there are _many_ advantages) of flying first-class is that you get off the plane quickly. Dipper, swinging his duffel bag at his side, followed the signs to the terminal building. He took the escalator down and saw Ford standing there already—it was just 11:02, but Dipper expected that Ford had been there quite a while.

He waved, Stanford waved back, and at the bottom of the escalator, Ford took his bag. "I've parked in the short-term lot," he said. "You packed light. I like that! An adventurer should always travel light."

"You're looking—younger!" Dipper said. His Grunkle's hair had darkened to nearly the same shade of brown as Dipper's, and he walked with a definite spring in his step.

"Yes, well, physiologically speaking, I am," Ford said. "People think I'm using hair dye because of my approaching marriage, but it's more complex than that. So is Stanley, by the way. Don't make too much of it, though, in public. We promised someone not to advertise what happened."

"I won't. How's Wendy?"

Ford smiled. "You care a great deal for Wendy, don't you? She's—well, she's doing as well as one could expect, I think. Shaken up and very upset. She's had trouble sleeping lately. I think she's been under unusual stress—you know that she's been taking extra classes, don't you?"

"Yes, she told me."

"Well, there's that, there's the fact that she's beginning her senior year in high school—you know how these transition points can be—are you warm enough?"

"It's pretty cold," Dipper admitted as they walked beneath a gray overcast sky toward Stanford's dark-blue Lincoln. "It's about, what, forty degrees?"

"Five Celsius," Ford said.

"It was fifty-nine in Piedmont when we left," Dipper said. "Uh, fifteen Celsius."

Ford chuckled. "I'm impressed that you did that in your head! Is that the only coat you brought?"

"Well, yes—I didn't think I'd need anything heavier," Dipper said. He'd left the jacket open, because it felt tight on him.

"We'll fix that," Ford said, tossing the duffel into the back seat of the Lincoln. "Get in and I'll start the heater."

While Dipper phoned home to tell his mother he had arrived safely, they took Airport Way to I-205, then south to I-84, and then east. Past the Interlachen exit, Ford pulled off and took Dipper to a Sprawl-Mart store, where they walked in, bought a suitably heavy and comfortably-sized dark-brown quilted parka, and walked out again, all in less than five minutes. Despite Grunkle Stan's warning, Dipper had already tried phoning Wendy, but her phone must have been turned off—it went straight to voice mail. And Grunkle Stan wasn't answering.

However, once they had headed east again, Dipper again tried Grunkle Stan's number and this time got him: "Yah?"

"This is Dipper. I'm in the car with Grunkle Ford now. Where are you?"

"Morris, Mercy Hospital. I dumped the boys on their aunt already, then came to see how things were goin'. Dan came through fine. He's in the recovery room now, and Wendy's back in the little surgery waitin' room where they make you turn off your cell phone. How soon until you get here?"

Dipper swiveled the phone away from his mouth. "Grunkle Stan wants to know how long—"

"Thirty-two minutes now," Ford said. "Given the current traffic conditions and assuming no interruptions."

"About half an hour," Dipper said.

"Oh, good, Dan will probably be in a room by then. OK, you go in the main entrance and there's an Information desk—"

Precisely thirty-two minutes later, Ford parked the Lincoln in front of the hospital, and, just before they got out, Dipper reached back for his duffel, unzipped it, and pulled out the fur trapper's hat. Maybe having it would comfort Wendy, he thought vaguely. But it had something inside it.

Dipper pulled out a little package about the size of a deck of cards. Oh, yeah, Wendy's present, wrapped in Christmas paper, peppermint-striped (heh, heh) but without a bow. It had been on Dipper's bedside stand, as had the hat, and he supposed he had swept them both up without noticing. He tucked the package into his pants pocket and carried the hat inside the hospital.

The nurse at the Information desk told them that Mr. Corduroy was in Room 222 and advised them how to get there. A few minutes later, they stood in the corridor outside the room, smelling alcohol and disinfectant, and Ford tapped softly.

Wendy opened the door. "Guys!" She stepped out and hugged Dipper. "Thanks for coming, man! I've been so scared and worried. OK, come in. Dad's still a little looped from the anesthetic. Don't be surprised if he's grumpy."

They came in. Dan had a private room—and a grossly outsized bed that left only about two feet clearance at the foot. he seemed to be wearing one of those open-backed hospital gowns, but mercifully, he lay mostly covered by sheets and blankets. His bandaged leg, though, hung in a traction frame. "Dan," Ford said.

"What, am I dyin'?" Dan Corduroy growled. "Wish I had my axe!"

"You're not dying, Dad," Wendy said.

Dan snorted. "But everybody's comin' to see me!"

"Because you got hurt and we're your friends," Ford said, smiling. He stepped forward and shook hands with Dan, who chuckled.

"Pines," he said, "you're the only guy I know whose hand don't feel like a little kid's!" His face clouded. "Now, all the while you was gone, how come I didn't ever know that your brother wasn't you? He just has five fingers, and you got six."

"People tend not to notice things like that," Ford said easily. "Stanley and I are so much alike in other ways. Is it all right if I sit down and talk for a while?"

"Hell, yeah. Take my mind of this doggone achy leg!"

Ford asked, "Wendy, have you had anything to eat?"

She shook her head.

"Dipper, take Miss Corduroy down to the cafeteria. Try to find something edible for her. One advantage of eating in a hospital—you're close to medical help!"

Dan guffawed more than the little joke deserved. Wendy stood across the bed from Ford, leaned over and kissed her father above the beard line, and said, "Later, Dad. The boys are stayin' with Aunt Sallie, and she'll bring them by this afternoon. Want me to bring you anything back?"

"Nah, I'm gonna be outa this place soon. Oh, hey, Wendy girl—do me a big favor?"

"Sure."

"Look, I got the McCree place mostly cleaned up except for that danged tree what fell on me and some scattered pine logs down toward the back. Run down to his place, cut up that last tree and use the loader to stack the logs for him. He does the splittin' himself. He owes me a check for the work. Oh, and I gotta return the rental by this evening at seven."

"Got it," Wendy said. "You sure you don't want me to hang around here?"

"Naw," Dan growled. "Docs say I gotta stay in the hospital for two-three days, and then hang out up here with Sallie for three weeks. She says she'll keep the boys up here until I can go back home with 'em. Meantime, I want you to take care of the house, take calls from anybody wants some wood cut—you can't handle the work, Mr. Blocker and his son will do it. I'll call you up if I need anything."

"OK, if that's all right with you."

"Yeah, yeah, I need somebody to keep an eye on the house and the business." Dan looked past Wendy. "Boy, you help her out, hear me?"

"Yes, sir, I will," Dipper said.

"Call me Dan," the bearded giant said. "Everybody does."

In the corridor, Wendy said, "Congrats, man! Dad's accepted you."

Dipper was staring at her as they walked toward the elevators. "Wendy, you don't look good."

"I'll tell you about it later," she said. Her voice dropped to a confidential level: "Dip, about sleeping with me—look, I'm all foggy in the brain right now, and I didn't mean, you know, making out."

"I had my hopes way up," he teased. "But I figured it wasn't that."

She reached to hold his hand, and their touch-telepathy made an instant connection: _I'm worried, Dip. Having these crazy dreams or hallucinations. Little like when the Love God hit me with that jealousy spell—like I'm out of control of my own head. Got to know what's up._

— _You can't sleep, can you?_

 _Not much. Tell you about it later. Hey, you got my hat!_

— _Thought it might, you know, uh, comfort you?_

 _Thanks, dude. About lunch, I'm not really hungry. You?_

— _Not really._

 _Let's find Stan and see if he'll drive us back home, OK?_

— _Fine with me!_

Stanley was more than ready to leave Morris, and they piled into the back seat of his El Diablo. As Ford had said, Stan, too, looked far younger and more fit than he had even back at Thanksgiving. Dipper commented on it.

"Yeah, I'm feelin' good, thanks. But this process has ended now, I think. I ain't noticed any more changes for the past week."

"Whatever you did," Wendy said, "it looks good on you."

"Looks weren't the idea, but it's a nice side effect," Stan told her. "Hang on. South to Gravity Falls."

* * *

They stopped at the Corduroy house, where Wendy changed into work clothes—heavy jeans, heavy work boots (black, scuffed, with metal toe caps), and a well-worn red-plaid flannel shirt, plus a hooded jacket. "Got anything to wear for a job, Dipper?" she asked.

No, just his regular clothes. So, Stan drove them to another round of shopping, this time at the Mercantile, a Gravity Falls store that supplied mainly loggers and farmers. "I got this," Stan said. Wendy helped Dipper pick out some boots, thick socks, heavy jeans, and a heavy flannel shirt. "I, uh, you know, never did logging before," he said.

"Won't this time, either. This is just yard clean-up," Wendy told him.

Then back to the Corduroy house. Stan said he would meet them at the Shack, but Dipper lingered beside the car, leaning in the driver's window. "Uh, Stan? Tonight, Wendy's asked me to stay over here with her. Look, there won't be any funny business between us, I promise, but—OK, man to man, will you give me permission if I swear we'll be good?"

"Dipper," Stanley said seriously, "Personally, yeah, I'd take your word for it, only I don't know what your mom would say about that. Lucky she ain't here! Seriously, kid, I trust you both. And yeah, I think she needs help. So take your bag inside, and I'll see you tomorrow, OK?"

A nervous Dipper went into Wendy's room, closed the door, and changed into the new work clothes—the jeans felt stiff—and then came out and Wendy admired him. "Real rugged, Dip! I like the way you look in that black shirt. OK, let's go. You won't need your heavy jacket on the job, but take it anyhow. Just peel off the store sticker on the arm."

"I never noticed that!" Dipper said, reaching to remove the Sprawl-Mart tape strip.

Wendy clapped on her trapper's hat. "You can take this back to Piedmont after Christmas is over," she told him. "Hey, speaking of Piedmont, have you called your folks yet?"

"Yeah, right away when Ford and I first started out, I gave Mom a call to tell her I was safe."

"Good. Come on, let's go—and then I got another favor to ask you."

They drove a couple of miles to the McCree house, where Ben "Bullets" McCree (an avid hunter) asked about Dan and said, "You know, Wendy, with him laid up and all, you don't have to do this."

"Sure, I do," Wendy said, grinning. "I'm a Corduroy, dude! This'll take a couple hours, tops."

Dan's pickup, with a trailer, stood in the corner of the yard. A wheel loader was parked beside two big piles of sharp-scented logs oozing orange pine resin. A few more scattered logs lay close to the woods line in the back yard, as well as a tall pine tree at the very back of the property. It had toppled, uprooting itself, and in the process had injured Dan.

From the truck Wendy got a heavy-duty chainsaw, which she fired up. The crown was easy, held off the ground by the branches, most of which she trimmed off in short order. Then for a long section she had to overbuck—that is, she had to make slanting cuts toward the ground but stop about three-quarters of the way through the trunk. The root section called for underbucking, too, cutting up from under. When she severed the trunk, leaving a short stump, gravity pulled the roots back down, and the root ball mostly settled into the hole they had wrenched up.

She finished cutting the trunk into ten four-foot sections. Then as Dipper used a rake to gather up the smaller twigs and debris, she started the wheel loader up and ferried the logs up to the stacks. She piled them onto the lower of the two log heaps.

Finally, she and Dipper cleaned up the last of the mess, raking the sawdust and smaller chips into the lawn. "There," she said, taking off the trapper hat to wipe her forehead. "Looks good. Let's see if Mr. McCree wants anything else."

The old guy didn't. He inspected the yard and nodded. "Good job," he said. "'Bout as good as your dad could do. He gonna be OK?" He let them into the kitchen, offered them coffee, which they declined, and moved two cats off his kitchen table so he'd have a place to rest his checkbook.

They'd already told him that, but Wendy assured him again: "Should be back home early in January, with his leg in a cast. He'll be on the job again by summer. My brother—you know Dan, Junior? Yeah, he's gonna come back after the first of the year and take care of the business until Dad can get out in the woods again, so call on us if you need any work done. Hey, you want me to take care of grinding the stumps?"

"No hurry on that," McCree said as he wrote a check. "Call me when the weather begins to warm up. We'll let 'em dry until then."

"Good deal." Wendy took the check and said, "Dad thanks you, Mr. M. If you want to go see him, he'll be in Mercy Hospital in Morris for about four or five days."

"I'll run up tomorrow," McCree said. "I'll tell him what a good job you done."

Then in the yard, Wendy said, "OK, dude, we gotta get the wheel loader up on the trailer. Then I'll drive it back to the rental place. Here's the other favor: You drive the Dart there, following me." She handed him her keys. "Then we'll pull through the bank so's I can drop the check in the night deposit—Dad would insist on that. And then I guess we'll get something to eat and . . . and go to my house. You can drive the whole way if you want. Man, I'm bushed!"

"I still don't have my license or even my learner's permit, you know," he said.

She grinned. "Yeah, but I gave you a flash course in driving, and this is Gravity Falls. The cops stop you, you just have a word with Blubs."

He reached to squeeze her hand. _Drive carefully, then,_ he told her mentally. _I'll follow you._

 _Sure thing. Well, I'll lower the ramp and get the loader up onto the trailer. Help me with the winch and chain, OK? What do you think of the working life?_

— _I hardly had a taste of it, but I enjoyed watching you. You're a real expert._

 _At some things. But tonight, you step up, Big Dipper. 'Cause when it comes to creepy stuff—you're the expert, not me._

— _OK, but once we get to your place, I want to know everything._

 _That's more than I know. But I'll share what I got with you. Are you scared?_

— _Not of anything supernatural. Just of failing you._

 _You'll never do that, Dip._ The warmth of feeling he got from her made him a little dizzy.

He hoped she was right. Failing her was the last thing he ever wanted to do.

He'd rather die first.


	9. Chapter 9

**Pining for Christmas**

* * *

 **9: Perchance to Scream**

Neither of them felt like hitting Greasy's, Yumberjacks, or even the fancy French restaurant, so they visited the market instead and bought simple sandwich fixings: turkey, tomato, lettuce, a baguette of crusty French bread. "Is this going to be enough for you?" Dipper asked. "You haven't had anything much to eat."

"Dude, neither have you," she said. They went back to the Corduroy house around sundown—"Place seems weird, so quiet and all," Wendy said, and each of them insisted on making the sandwiches . . . so they wound up side by side in the kitchen, Dipper making a sandwich for Wendy and vice-versa.

"Man," she said, "I'm training my brothers in helping around the house. Want to come over and be a role model, Dip?"

"Any time you ask me," he said. They knew each other's taste—Wendy put pepper jack cheese and lettuce but no tomato on his, he put tomato, lettuce, and he put the works, plus some horseradish mayo, on hers. They added raw veggies to their meal (little carrots, celery sticks, a few olives, and some crisp sweet pickles), as well as the last of a family-sized bag of potato chips ("Amazed my brothers left any," Wendy said). Wendy also chopped together some fruit for a salad that would serve as dessert, a banana, some apples, red grapes, some walnuts, and Mandarin orange slices from a small can, with a little mayo to moisten.

They took the food and a couple of Pitt's into the living room on trays, sat on the loveseat, and turned on the TV. "Getting cold," Wendy observed. "I'll adjust the thermostat after we eat. Right now, we can just sit close together."

That suited Dipper. As they ate, she switched on the TV, and they caught a weather report—overcast with some light rain forecast for the next day, high of 42, low of 34—and watched "Cash Wheel" right after the news and weather. Though it wasn't a favorite of theirs, they got pulled into guessing the hidden words as the contestants guessed letters. One four-word phrase, three letters, two, four, and four, turned out to be "NOT ON YOUR LIFE," which Wendy got when only the N's and F were showing.

Dipper tended to overthink the clues, and Wendy won their informal game, four correct answers to his two. She even got the single-word bonus, HELPFUL, with just the E and P showing.

"See," Dipper complained, "the contestant asked for B, C, D, P, and E! If she'd asked for S, H, R, D, and L plus E, I might have got it!"

"Yeah, yeah—tell you this, though, Stan's like a Ninja master at this game. The few times he and I watched together, I like _never_ won against him!"

Dipper grinned. "You know, that time when Mabel took over the Shack, Grunkle Stan won a whole bunch of money on this show before losing it all."

"Yeah, I remember," Wendy said, laughing. "'Cuz he didn't know the meaning of the word 'please!'"

"Funny," Dipper said. "Stan always has trouble with _please_ , Ford with _thank you_."

"Not so strange, dude," Wendy said. "You and Mabes are, like, all pre-planning versus all random, thoughtless action. Polar opposite twins. That's like a television trope. You can look it up!"

"Yeah, you're right about the two of us. Wendy, Mabel worries me," Dipper admitted.

Wendy finished the last of her cola and put her arm over his shoulder. "She still in the dumps?"

Dipper leaned against her. "Not so much. She's really excited about seeing Teek again next week. I think she's kinda getting over Russ. She thinks she was in love with him, but I really believe it's more a case of her not really knowing the guy all that well. It's easy to fantasize about falling in love with someone you don't really know—at least it is for her. And I don't have to tell you how quick on the draw she is—'Hi, I'm Mabel. Do you like my sweater? I made it myself! Want to get married?'"

Wendy chuckled. "Yeah, impulsive. But mostly harmless. Do I need to have another girl-to-girl talk with her, you think?"

Dipper squirmed. "I don't know. If you don't mind, though, yeah. See, it's hard for me to talk to her—well, OK, lately she's been teasing me a lot. She keeps talking about, I don't know, going without her clothes."

"You're kidding!" Wendy's face clouded. "Wait, wait, did that stupid body-paint picture make her think that I—that when you and I get together—'cuz I would never go around just in paint, man, not even if it was just you—crap!"

"I know what you mean, Lumberjack Girl," Dipper said. "Don't get all flustered."

"That damn picture! I shouldn't have done it to start with, but me and Tambry just got terminally bored that day and it just seemed like a big joke. Should've drawn the line when she wanted to take pictures, though! Sorry if that's turned Mabel all ga-ga."

"That was a little part of it," Dipper admitted. "But she got on this kick earlier. I don't know if it's just teasing me or if she's getting some kind of perverted thing going on in her head, or what."

"Hormones, Dip," Wendy said. "That's probably all it is. Girls get some strange notions when they're going through puberty."

"I thought just guys did," Dipper told her. "I, uh, this one time? I drew your face on a pillow case, so I could, you know, look at it while, uh, while going to sleep and all."

"That's sweet," Wendy said, surprising him. "But girls do goofy stuff, too, and with Mabes it might be real goofy. She's developing, Dip. Curious about whether guys find her attractive. Testing her limits. Probably just trying to get a rise out of you—teasing, you know." She paused and blushed. "Long as she doesn't do something dumb like send Teek a sexting photo, like that one of me—"

"You didn't send it," Dipper said.

Wendy sighed. "Yeah, I was so mad at Tambry! But then all this junk came along and kinda put it in proportion, so I'm just gonna let it drop. I _am_ tempted to send her a copy of her picture though—'cept she'd probably just forward it to Robbie!" She blushed an even rosier shade and muttered, "So, uh, Dip? What did you think of, uh, you know?"

"I've kind of seen you before," he reminded her. "At Moon Trap Pond, remember. Before that, when we used the electron carpet, though I swear I didn't look, you know, under your clothes even when I was in your body. And—well—it's so hard for me to talk about this!" He took her hand and thought to her, _What did I think of the picture?_ _You're so beautiful!_

 _Thank you, man. One day._

— _But not tonight._

 _Nope. Tonight, we're gonna be good. OK, man, I sleep in boxer shorts and a tee. You?_

— _Just gonna keep my clothes on. Except I'm changing to my old jeans—these new ones are stiff!_

 _I'll toss 'em in the wash before we turn in and dry them tomorrow with a softener sheet. That will make them more comfortable. Go change now if you want. I promise not to peek!_

They kissed, and Dipper went into Wendy's room, where he'd left his old jeans folded over her chair. He took off the new ones—they could practically stand unaided—and slipped his softer, more comfortable ones on, but he kept the soft black flannel shirt. As she had promised, Wendy popped the jeans into the washer, together with a couple of pairs of her own. They watched a TV show about two brothers investigating the supernatural—when one of them got surprised by a demon, Wendy said, "Boo! Me an' Dip would've seen that coming!"—and then she transferred the jeans to the dryer.

By then it was close to nine. Wendy called her dad's hospital room and talked first to her aunt Sallie—who was going to stay right up until the end of visiting hours and who insisted Wendy tell her exactly what had happened to Dan "because he's so Corduroy stubborn he won't say anything much to me about it." Wendy explained it was a freak accident, a tall pine that must have been leaning already and after the storms the soil around its roots had loosened enough to let it collapse all at once. "Dad scrambled, and it didn't hit him square," she finished, "but it got his leg."

Only then did her aunt let Wendy talk to Dan, who was sharper than he had been, the anesthetics finally wearing off, and who seemed cheered at her report that she and Dipper had, between them, finished the McCree job. "Yeah," Dipper heard her say, "he paid us in full. I dropped the check in the bank and returned the equipment to RentThemTools. They said you'd prepaid, and we were on time, so no balance due."

Dan had more detailed instructions for her that went on for three or four minutes, but finally Wendy said, "Dad, between now and New Year's it's gonna be slack. It always is."

A pause, and then she said, "No way. We'll call off Apocalypse Training for this year. . .. 'Cuz you can't go, and I'm not gonna freeze my butt off with the boys, that's why! You know they won't mind me! You have to keep 'em in line. Maybe you can double up and do one next summer with them and then one next Christmas!"

More silence as Dan talked. Then Wendy said, "Don't worry about all of that. I talked to Junior, and he'll get leave from his job to come down and take over in January. You can make the appointments and keep the books and all and he'll take care of the logging and the carpentry, and maybe when you're up and around, you can go on the jobs with him and supervise. Don't _worry_ about the business, it'll be OK."

Then Dan said something that went on for a long time. "Junior can take over my room," Wendy said, "and I'll sleep over in the Shack. Melody can use help with the baby, and I can drive over every day after school to keep the house running. Yeah, I'll cook on the afternoons when I don't have night school, but you gotta make Junior help, too. How's that? OK, we'll talk about it."

When she was off the phone, Wendy rolled her eyes. "Dad. For every solution, there's four more problems! But if Soos and Melody are cool with it, I'll bunk in at the Shack until Dad's well enough for Junior to leave again. I mean, Junior's too old and too big to share the boys' room now, so he can take mine until June or whatever."

"Uh, where would you, uh, in the Shack—" Dipper began.

She shoved his shoulder playfully. "In the attic, dude! You wouldn't mind having me in your bed, would you?"

It was his turn to blush, but he managed to smile and shake his head. "Never," he whispered hoarsely.

* * *

They decided to turn in early—Wendy was exhausted after everything that had happened, and Dipper felt tired, too. Wendy prepared for bed and then called him in. She was wearing flannel boxers—plaid, of course, red and black—and a black tee shirt. "I'll sit beside your bed," Dipper offered, his hand on her chair.

She made a face, got into bed and threw back the covers. "Get in here with me! You gonna wear your jeans for real?"

"Uh, yeah. Let me change into a tee shirt, though."

He did and then slipped in next to her. "It's getting cool."

"Snuggle up," she said. "Listen, Dip: I don't think you ought to sit up in the chair because the—I dunno, the Dreamsnake, I call it, the thing I think I see or hallucinate or something—it flows around on the floor. Don't want your feet down there in its range. Mainly, now, I want you to hold my arm or some deal, because if it comes, I want to make sure I'm really seeing it, and it's not just in my head."

"I should have brought my night-vision goggles," Dipper told her. "Only I didn't know about all this."

"Your being here's enough. Give me a goodnight kiss and then let's try to get some sleep, OK?"

It was a chaste kiss, lips, no tongue. She lay on her side with her back to him, and he sort of spooned her—though he didn't dare press too close—and felt her hair between them and smelled its fragrance. He held onto her arm just above the crook of her elbow. She sent him a thought: _Warm enough?_

— _Yeah, feels good._

 _Thanks for understanding, Dip. If I get a nightmare or some deal, wake me up, OK? 'Cuz I'm not really sure whether something's really going on or if I'm just having crazy dreams._

— _I'm here for you, Wendy._

He felt her mood settle, and very soon he knew that she had fallen asleep. He felt her consciousness slide away, like someone relaxing into a warm pool.

Dipper determined to stay awake and be vigilant, though. But the warmth of the girl under the covers with him, the regular soft sound of her breathing, lulled him.

As she slept peacefully, he lay facing the wall with her bedroom window in it, and he could barely make it out, a gray rectangle barred where the four big panes joined, a heart-shaped hanging prism just faintly visible. No moon rode in the sky—it was close to a new moon, anyway—and the clouds might have slipped over Gravity Falls like the lid of a pot.

Everything was quiet—he could hear, very faintly, the ticking of the pendulum clock in the kitchen. Once a pine cone dropped onto the tin roof on the other side of the house and rattled down to fall off the eaves.

From the distance came a shrill, peculiar cry: _"Whoop! Whoop! . . . Whoo! . . . Whoo!"_ It had an eerie, almost electronic sound, but immediately Dipper thought, _Spotted owl, male. How did I even know that?_

Of course. He was touching Wendy, and even though she slept, her knowledge of the ways and wildlife of the woods must have seeped into his mind. He sent her a silent message: _I'm so in love with you._

He didn't get a mental response, but she murmured and sounded happy, though she did not wake up.

Comfortable, warm, and relaxed, and despite his resolution to stay alert, Dipper slipped into sleep.

* * *

They had gone to bed about ten. He woke sharply sometime around midnight, feeling cold inside. And certain that the two of them were no longer alone.

 _Something's happening!_

Wendy still slept on, her arm warm and relaxed beneath his palm. Cautiously, Dipper raised his head from the pillow they shared.

His eyes had accustomed themselves to the darkness, and he could make out the contours of the room, though the only light came from the little red power bulb on her phone charger and the one on the satellite box attached to her TV. He could see the door of her closet, to the side of the dresser that doubled as her TV stand.

Hadn't it been . . . closed?

He was almost sure it had been closed. Now a wedge of blackness made it look slightly ajar, cracked three inches or so.

No intruding sound, though. Just the faint, soft ticking of the clock. No creak of hinge, no whisper of belly scales across the hardwood floor. No hissing breaths.

Slowly, Dipper sat up in the bed, his palm still touching Wendy's arm. He could see the floor, but it was all darkness down there, nothing visible.

"Mmm, nooo," Wendy murmured, stirring. Dread radiated from her skin into Dipper's hand.

He felt her wake up and mentally reassured her: _I'm here._

 _Dipper, it's started. It's happening again!_

— _Can't see anything._

 _Look through my eyes!_

Wow. _Wendy must have great night vision,_ Dipper thought.

She answered his thought: _Yeah, I do. See it now?_

— _Where?_

 _Comin' around to your side. It's under the bed!_

Dipper shifted and stared downward. Now he could make out the floor—the individual boards, dim though they were. Oh, it was still murky, but he could see a lot more than he had earlier. Experimentally, he moved his hand, and when his contact with Wendy broke, everything went dark. He touched her again—and saw the sinister shadow form come pouring out, from beneath the bed, restlessly moving in swirls and arcs.

— _It doesn't look real. Two-dimensional, more a shadow than a creature. Want to turn on the light?_

Wendy's emotions fluctuated, alarm and then a strange kind of relief. She thought, _No, then it just vanishes. So you can see it, too?_

— _I can see something._

 _How do we fight it?_

— _Wait, wait, it's doing something!_

Though it was not like their telepathy, Dipper felt a radiating interest from the dark, crawling thing—or just an awareness of the two of them, maybe—and a sinister feeling of triumph.

Wendy rolled over and then sat next to him. "Dude," she said, "it's humping up!"

Dipper felt the prickle of fear—the kind of fear you have when a snake squirms across your path, when you feel a tickle on your neck and realize a spider has dropped down your collar.

The darkness had gathered in a pool, and now the pool was rising, bulging up, looking like a smooth, globe-topped cylinder of tar, a huge upside-down test-tube shape, but absolutely black.

"Dipper, what's it doing?"

He couldn't tell her. It flattened and flared, like a cobra spreading its hood. It leaned—

"Run!" Dipper yelled, but too late.

The living darkness collapsed on them, as the tree had on Dan—

It enveloped them—

And Dipper lost his hold. He felt himself falling, but he never hit anything solid. "Wendy! Where are you?"

He heard no answer. The darkness stopped his ears. It held him in a cold, slimy grip. He was drowning in it.

"Wendy! Wendy!"


	10. Chapter 10

**Chapter 10: Eleven Letters, and the Clue Is: It Wants to Eat Your Soul**

* * *

Far away from Gravity Falls geographically, and in the late hours of the night, the researcher gasped as the message flashed through:

 _Two of them!_

Despite the thrill, because of it, the researcher had a difficult time attuning to the T'klatlumodh. _Which two, which two?_ The cool one, the girl, yes, the T'klatlumodh had been working on her, slowly eroding her resistance by exhausting her, depriving her of sleep, suggesting the powerful things she could do merely with her mind if she gave in, gave herself to darkness, even demonstrating on a (what? Relative? Friend? Enemy?) person with whom she had been angry.

One was definitely the girl.

The other, the other—the researcher concentrated, straining so hard that a few drops of blood leaked from his nose and splatted on the gray table top, staining one of the papers on which the researcher had made notes. Who was it, who was it?

Male, yes, discernibly a male, but which symbol, though? The researcher mentally flicked through the ten. The question mark had a male undertone to it and in his bafflement, it seemed appropriate. Call him the question mark for now—

Wait, though, how had they come to be caught together? It was night, and by now the researcher realized that the T'klatlumodh had manifested in the girl's bedroom.

What was a boy doing in her bedroom? Were they already lovers? That could disrupt the scheme—for the researcher's purposes, the individuals symbolized on the Great Wheel could be relatives, but they could not be lovers!

Not until the researcher forced them to become insatiable slaves—and then they would not be lovers in the common sense, but agents of lust, indifferent to whom they mated with or to the perversions they explored.

If they had already established a bond, though—that would ruin everything.

The researcher sent a mental message to the servant: _Test them. Put them together. Tempt them to physical love. Observe them. Do not let them merge!_

If they reached for each other, if they thought they were dying, if they were virginal and thought this was their only, final chance, if they united their bodies—

Well, the two would be useless, so the T'klatlumodh could have them. But if not—he would have to prevent the T'klatlumodh, to stop it from permitting the union oof the two bodies, because they had to be preserved intact until the researcher could have the whole set.

 _Where, though, where?_ The trail of the Ankhahath, the Vessel, had gone cold in California. Where had it gone from there? The curse of it was that though the researcher could contact the T'klatlumodh mentally, the creature itself was blind, deaf, voiceless, incapable of detecting vibrations or smells or tastes—unless it encountered one of the Ten. It had no sense of geography or time, for it was worldless and beyond time. It held the ancient lurking power of ultimate darkness.

Yet it had its weaknesses. Five seconds of direct sunlight would wither it. Should its Vessel be destroyed, it would be hurled back into outer darkness—and should it wrest open the doors between _there_ and _here_ , it would revolt against the mortal who had dared to imprison it, or a part of it, here in Time and Space. From its exile it would roar back with a vengeance that, on earth at least, would seal the researcher's doom as well as its own.

From this thorn Danger, the researcher had to pluck the beautiful, corrupted rose, Power.

Heady, intoxicating!

The researcher, with closed eyes and throbbing temples, tried to perceive the situation.

There, somewhere cold, the T'klatlumodh paused, waiting, questioning. It had enveloped the two, held them inside itself.

Paradoxically, the interior of the creature was larger than the earth itself. This had to do with paradimensions, as Stanford Pines would put it, or with transrealitymajig doomaflotchets, as Fiddleford McGucket might phrase it. For better or worse, the researcher did not know either of these gentlemen existed, or where they lived

 _Put them together,_ the researcher ordered.

It was, the researcher could sense, an hour of deep darkness where the T'klatlumodh was. That was good. Any light at all would make the creature retreat to its shell, its Vessel, the Ankhahath, where it would cower until night fell again. And in retreating it would have to drop the two captives.

Pity that the girl's, well, call it _treatmen_ t, had only just begun. A month more of exposure, and she could have been made wild, wanton, focused on her own pleasure to the exclusion of everything else. Easy prey.

For pleasure was a tremendous lure, more for males than females, but it worked on both to warp their best intentions, to alter their behaviors. Ultimately, it was strong enough to enslave them, body and soul.

But if she was _not_ a virgin—if she and the male with her, the question mark, had, well, indulged—then that would change everything. It would not matter so much if the Ten united on the other side, the side of Light, but the Darkness could not use their power if too many strands of true love were woven among them.

The two, for the researcher's purposes, would have to be . . . removed. From the wheel. From existence.

And with two missing from the Wheel, its potency would be broken. Oh, two more would come along in time to take their places on the Wheel—every generation had its quota—but that would take years the researcher did not care to waste.

So . . . test the two, then. Test them. See what happened when they were put together. In the concealing dark. Things were always so much more intense in the darkness. Temptations so much stronger.

It would be terribly tricky. The T'klatlumodh would selfishly _want_ them to consummate their relationship, or try to—the moment it was accomplished, and despite all the researcher could do, the T'klatlumodh could destroy their bodies and absorb their souls. It did not matter to that creature that the souls it absorbed might be unsullied, innocent. That just made the meal . . . spicier.

If the two resisted, though—then the researcher would have to order the T'klatlumodh to drop them.

But not before planting seeds of darkness in their souls.

Seeds that would grow to consume them.

To corrupt them.

 _To make them . . . mine . . . ._


	11. Chapter 11

**Chapter 11: A Call from the Depths of Night**

Their phones (as they later learned) rang at the same moment, 12:00 midnight. Stan thumbed his on and growled, "Yah?" at the same moment that Ford said, "Stanford Pines speaking."

Oddly, they did not hear each other. Both did hear the same strange, high-pitched voice, though: "The Corduroy house. Now. They need help!" And then dead air as the caller broke the connection.

In his room, Stanley muttered, "What the heck?" He checked caller ID:

 _ **UNKNOWN CALLER 666-291-2396**_

"That ain't a real number," he told himself, though he was already out of bed and pulling on his pants.

In his adjoining bedroom, Ford was a little more thorough. He did the same ID check, went on his laptop (always plugged in and turned on in his room) and said, "Odd. There hasn't been a 666 area code in seven years!" And he dressed, too.

The elder Mystery Twins met each other in the hall outside their rooms. "Where you goin', Poindexter?" Stanley asked.

"I received an odd call that makes me uneasy," Stanford replied

"Me too. Dipper and Wendy in trouble?"

"Um—I thought it meant the Corduroys in trouble," Stanford said.

"Guess again, Poindexter," Stanley said as they hurried down the stairs and out the side door. "All the other Corduroys are up in Morris to take care of Dan. Wendy was alone, so I told Dipper he could sleep over to keep her company."

"That's . . . very irregular," Ford said. They stepped out into the cold night. "My car?"

"I'm faster." They got into the Stanleymobile and Stan started the engine and peeled out around the circular drive and down the long driveway. "They're not gonna get up to funny business, Ford. I got Dipper's word on that."

"He's only fourteen!"

"FIFteen!" Stan bellowed. "For crying out loud, remember their ages! And anyhow, age has nothing to do with it—he's a Pines!"

"Well—there is that," Ford admitted, holding on as they turned out into the highway. "Even Dad never broke his word."

"Nor you," Stanley said. "We shoulda put on jackets. The heat'll kick on in a minute, though."

"That call—the area code—"

"Yeah, I caught that. Six sixty-six, mark of the Devil or some deal."

"Not . . . exactly," Ford said, and Stan rolled his eyes as his brother started into lecture mode. "You see, in 1895, archaeologists excavating the ancient Egyptian city of Oxyrhynchus unearthed a cache of ancient papyrus documents. Some were so badly stained and time-worn that they couldn't be read, but they were preserved at Oxford University. Then in 2005, a team used new imaging technology to decipher the faint writing. One small sheet was part of the Revelation of St. John the Divine, which included the verse about the Mark of the Beast. It turned out that this fragment was by far the oldest surviving manuscript of Revelation and that the number was distinctly written as 616, not 666."

"So, all these years people got it wrong?"

"It appears so."

"Huh. Bet the poor guy who lives at 666 gets all kinds of hate mail!"

Ford said, "Wait a minute." He pulled out his phone and looked up received calls. "Two-nine-one, two-three-nine-six."

Stan had roared through town, blasting through a red light. The windshield had started to fog, and he turned on the defroster—the heater was puffing out warm air. As the fog cleared, he turned hard onto the highway that led toward the Shack, but then he took the left fork that led its winding way uphill to Manly Dan's place. "What, ya gonna bet those numbers on a lottery?"

"No," Ford said slowly. "You'd better hurry."

"Doin' eighty-six! What's the big problem?

Ford cleared his throat. "Well—if I read this as 2-9-12, 3-9-6 and transpose the numbers as the letters of the alphabet, I get B-I-L, C-I-F."

Stan didn't say another word, but stamped hard on the accelerator.

* * *

 _Meanwhile, in utter darkness:_

Dipper spread his arms out and groped all around. "Wendy!"

His voice rang only in his head. It didn't make a sound that he could actually hear.

And then, also from someplace within his head, he heard, "Pine Tree! Look for the gleam!"

"What? _Bill_?"

He had a minute chip of Bill in his body, just a few molecules—the result of Cipher's saving his life at a critical point. Sometimes it gave him disturbing dreams. Sometimes it allowed him willingly to enter the Dreamscape and speak to the disembodied Bill, who claimed to be reformed but who still seemed to be a force of chaos.

"The _gleam,_ Pine Tree! Chop-chop! Think like you're a lighthouse! Keep your eyes open!"

Though Dipper couldn't feel a solid floor below him, he shuffled, turning, directing his gaze the way a lighthouse beam would sweep the night, staring into nothing. "I don't see any—"

"Lighthouse, Pine Tree! Turn! Little more to the left!"

"I see it!"

It was a silver gleam, like a distant star, a silvery faint star a million light-years away, so dim that he would never have spotted it had he not been desperately searching.

"Go! Go get Red! Remember when you were my puppet!"

Dipper recalled when Bill had yanked him out of his own body—how as a ghost he had willed himself to move. He tried that now.

"Yes, go! Hurry!"

He couldn't tell it by looking, he could see nothing, not even his own arm and hand—but he stretched out, fingers reaching for the impossible star—

And he touched warm flesh.

Which recoiled in shock.

But he spread his palm on—her stomach?

— _Wendy?_

 _Dipper!_

He felt her hand close on his wrist, and then they were embracing. With her cheek pressed close to his, he could feel her mouth moving, but he couldn't hear a sound.

— _We can't talk! But our telepathy works!_

 _You OK, man?_

— _I'm in one piece and not hurt. You?_

 _Yeah, far as that goes. Where are we, dude?_

— _I think we must be inside that Dreamsnake thing!_

 _Wish I had my axe!_

"Pine Tree! Merry Christmas! Give her the present!"

 _Who was that?_

— _Bill Cipher, I think. We must be sort of touching the Mindscape in here._

"Give her the present, dummy! You've got seconds left!"

The present. Dipper fumbled and felt the package in the front pocket of his jeans. He pulled it out.

— _Here, I got this for you. Bill thinks it's important you take it._

 _Dude, this isn't the time!_

— _Bill may know more about this than we do!_

" _May_ know? If I had a foot, I'd kick your butt, Pine Tree! Red! Open the present if you want to save Dipper!"

Dipper didn't let go of her. He felt her moving her hands as she, what, tore off the paper? Then suddenly light burst out—brilliant light, green light, outlining them both, and they could see each other, painted green with hollow black shadows where the light couldn't touch. The five emeralds in the earrings and bracelet speared blinding rays.

"What are these?"

Dipper heard her! "Put them on!" he said. He took the bracelet and slipped it over her left hand. The gems blazed even brighter.

The universe was heaving. It was like standing in a pitch-black infernal bouncy castle.

Wendy was fiddling with the earrings. "OK, I got them in! Don't let go of me!"

Dipper hugged her waist. Now he realized that the silvery star he had seen was Wendy's belly-button ring—one made of silver, a faux wedding ring he had given her when, in the Old West, they had to pretend to be a married couple. Her black tee had ridden up, exposing her midriff and the ring—and somehow it had generated some light on its own.

"Hang on!" Bill's voice, ringing out now. "It's gonna be a bumpy ride!"

* * *

 _"No!"_ The researcher, furious beyond words, swept his arm across the table, knocking books and black-dripped candles to the floor. He seized a mirror (used for arcane spells) and smashed it to sharp fragments. He pounded his fists on the table, cutting them on glass, ignoring the flying drops of blood. So close, and something intervened! They had been in the palm of his hand, and he was losing them!

He stood, weaving the air in a complex gesture, and began an incantation: _"T'klatlumodh! Iluntasuna, zurekin deitzen diot! Hona hemen lurzorua, landatu zure hazia! Utzi ezazu hazten, utzi burmuina, gau iluna loratu! T'klatlumodh!"_

 _Too late, too late, he could not communicate with the servant of darkness, it could not tolerate light—_

"Hate and hell take you both!" the researcher cursed, his bloody fists clenched. "I'll find you! I'll track you down! _You will be mine_!"

He collapsed into his chair, gasping, and wrapped a handkerchief around his right hand, the one most deeply cut. Red blossoms of blood bloomed on it. Whatever was happening to the T'klatlumodh was tearing force from within him, too. He felt strength draining from him. He seized the edge of the table and fought to retain consciousness. If he lost it at this critical instant—

 _Pine tree!_ He had distinctly heard the words "Pine Tree." Another one of the symbols! Hang on to that! He had been wrong. Not the question mark. But now he knew two of the human representatives of the great wheel were alive, a male and a female. And even if the T'klatlumodh were temporarily vanquished, he might still have a chance of locating the area where the two figures of the Zodiac lived. If he could regain his strength before the print of the event faded from this reality.

It would be harder if the Servant were truly banished, cast into the outer darkness—

No, no, the T'klatlumodh would flee into its shell, would be safe there. No one could suspect its hiding place.

But if they did—if somehow the shell were destroyed—

That would make matters infinitely more difficult.

The researcher picked up a crystal scrying ball from the floor where he had dropped it. He ignored the smear of blood he left on the surface and gazed into the globe, reaching with his mind.

He saw . . . only emptiness.

 _Useless._

He snarled with rage.

 _What was happening to the T'klatlumodh?_

* * *

 _The column of liquid-like blackness shivered, distorted, and heaved. A spear of green light tore its way through its surface, a pencil-thin beam—and the fabric of its being ripped, and more green spiked through, fragments of unearthly black boiling away in the tide of ineffable light._

 _Love lived in that light._

 _The darkness could not stand against it._

 _Silently screaming, writhing, the remnants of the Dreamsnake fell to the floor, gathered into a diminished serpentine shape, thin and wasted, and streamed away, seeking safety—_

* * *

"Holy cats!" Stan yelled. "The place is on fire!"

Ford leaped out of the passenger seat into the cold and stared at the side of the Corduroy house. Everything was dark, except for one window—and unbelievably bright green light shot through it, flickering and pulsing. "I don't think so—come on!"

He ran to the front door.

It was locked.

"Stand aside!" Stan yelled.

* * *

The light faded. Wendy, never letting go of Dipper's hand, turned on the gooseneck reading light and in its warm glow, they stared into each other's face. "Oh, man! What was that?"

"I don't know!" Dipper said. He hugged her tight, squeezing his eyes closed. "I thought we were dead!"

"Yeah. Lucky you had help, huh?"

They both yipped and spun. A strange, skinny, androgynous figure—naked, with female breasts but also with male, um, equipment—stood grinning at them. Shock-haired, with only one eye, lemon-yellow.

" _Bill?"_ Dipper said.

"I only got a minute, Pine Tree, so let me do my thing. Red, I gotta look in your pretty green eyes."

"Don't let him!" Dipper yelled.

"I'll do you first, then!" Bill said sharply. "I have no time!"

The hermaphrodite grabbed Dipper's cheeks and immobilized his head. "Stare straight forward!"

A round yellow eye, slit-pupiled, filled Dipper's field of vision from his right eye, then his left. "Now Red. Dipper, tell her it's OK!"

"Uh—better let him," Dipper said.

He watched in frozen shock as the naked hermaphrodite took hold of Wendy's cheeks and stared first in her left eye, then her right. It looked almost as though the two were kissing, though he saw Wendy's lips writhe in disgust.

Bill let go and stepped away. "OK, you're both clean." Then he looked down at himself. "Oh, man! This is what I get for manifesting between two dopes in love! I'm like the Shapeshifter torn between two forms. Latched onto this shape just as the beastie dissolved, and didn't plan it. Hey, like this I'd never be lonely on a Saturday night!"

"Bill!" Dipper yelled. He had taken Wendy into his arms again, and she was hugging him and glowering at the strange figure that had invaded her bedroom.

Bill shrugged, grinning shamelessly. "I'd be embarrassed if I were capable of that! Listen quick, guys—the T'klatlumodh didn't succeed in putting its darkness in either of you. Narrow escape. But somebody sent it, don't know who. You're both in danger."

"The T'ka—what?" Wendy demanded.

"Dreamsnake to you, Red. Uh-oh. Here comes company. Gotta go! Reality is debatable! Collect gold! Emeralds are great, too!"

With a silent poof, the figure dissolved into floating yellow dust motes.

A second later, the bedroom door slammed open.

Dipper stood embracing Wendy.

They both were clothed, but—

Well, they were hugging each other awfully closely. And their clothes looked disheveled. And it _was_ a bedroom. And the bed _was_ very rumpled.

"Dipper!" Ford said, pausing in the doorway. "Are you all right?"

Over his shoulder, Stan was grinning. "I'd say they both look like they're doin' fine, Brainiac."

But in a grim voice, Wendy replied, "Not really."

And Dipper added, "I think we've got big trouble."


	12. Chapter 12

**Chapter 12: Creature of Night, Brought to Light**

* * *

"I'll come back tomorrow," Ford said after he had heard them out, "with my bag of tricks, and I'll give this place a thorough investigation. We have to learn what we're up against."

"You ain't comin' alone, Ford," Stan said. "I'm gonna be with you. You got your brains, but ya might need that other thing—you know, punchin'!"

"I gotta come too," Wendy said. "This started in my room. I can't let you Stan dudes go it alone."

"If Wendy comes," Dipper said firmly, "so do I."

"OK, OK," Stan said with a grin. "I think between the four of us we could kick anything's ass. 'Scuse the French, Wendy!"

" _Quand la provocation est forte_ ," Wendy said with a shrug, " _la langue doit correspondre."_

Ford's dark eyebrows rose. " _Ton accent est très bon, mademoiselle_!"

Stan said, "What am I missin' here?"

"I've had a year of French in high school," Wendy said. "So, I was just excusing your French, Stan."

"Well, well," Ford said, "here's what I suggest: We all go back to the McGucket mansion for the rest of the night. Then tomorrow we'll come back here just before noon—when the power of the sun is at its fullest—and track down the source of this darkness and try to exorcise it."

"S'posed to be raining," Stan said.

"Even so, the noon hour is best for dealing with things like this. Are you all ready to go?"

"Let me grab some clothes," Wendy said. "Can't run around in an undershirt and boxers."

"No word of that sentence made sense to me," Stan complained.

Wendy took a pair of jeans and a flannel shirt from the closet, then underwear and socks from a dresser drawer. She also put on a heavy coat. "Not goin' to change in here," she said, shivering, and not from cold. She stuffed her other clothes into a fabric shopping bag. "I'll be OK just for the drive to your place."

Dipper put on his shirt, socks, and shoes while Wendy was pulling on her boots, both teens sitting on the foot of her bed. Then he got into his heavy jacket and handed Wendy her trapper's hat. She got his pine-tree hat from where it hung on one of her bedposts and clapped it onto his head. "Nearly have to reach up to do this now!" she said. "You goin' to stop growing or are you trying to top me out?"

"We'll see," he told her.

At Ford's insistence, they left every light in the Corduroy house on—"If Dan complains about the power bill, I'll pay it!" and they went outside. "I'll take my car," Wendy said. "Might need wheels tomorrow. Meet you there."

"Going with Wendy," Dipper told his Grunkles.

Stan let Wendy pull out of the yard first, then followed. "You OK to drive?" Dipper asked Wendy.

"Yeah. Tired as hell, dude, but maybe away from home I might be able to get a little sleep."

The heater began to blow warm air before they reached the town limits. They drove through a quiet Gravity Falls—though it looked festive, with the lampposts decorated with white Christmas-light snowflakes, green holly leaves and red berries, and white-and-red striped candy canes. The big Christmas tree in front of the city hall glowed all colors, with a golden star at the crown.

Even the shop owners had left their decorative lights burning. Greasy's Diner had been outlined with strings of blue, red, green, yellow, and white lights, the old-fashioned kind shaped like tulip buds. Dipper thought they had probably hung on the diner annually since the 1950s.

They met hardly any traffic—one lonely pickup heading toward the valley mouth, and a couple of trucks idled in the mall parking lot, sending up plumes of gray exhaust, but they saw no cars. Wendy pulled up the drive to the McGucket mansion and parked in the circle in front of the house, at about the three o'clock position. That let Stan pass her and drive the Stanleymobile under the carport to the side.

Dipper and Wendy got out and Ford held the mansion's side door for them. At the top of the stairs, on the second floor, Stan said, "Wendy can have Mabel's room, and—"

"Not leaving her," Dipper said firmly.

"Yeah, I'd feel safer if Dip and I shared his room," Wendy said. "No funny business, we promise. Don't worry."

Surprisingly, Stan put his hand on her shoulder and pulled her in for a hug. "I don't doubt either of you knuckleheads," he said in a gruff voice. "If it makes you feel better, yeah, take the same room. Hey, we'll let you sleep in tomorrow. I'll wake you up when it's time to get ready."

"Thanks, man," Wendy said.

Dipper opened the door of his bedroom—well, the bedroom he always used when he slept over—and they went inside. "Nice room, man," Wendy said. "Don't think I've been in it before." The window looked out toward the Falls, though on this dark night—dark early morning, it was past one—they couldn't be seen.

Wendy took off her coat—Dipper hung it in the closet, along with his—and then her socks and boots. Dipper said, "Uh, bathroom is through here. It's the one that my room shares with Mabel, so nobody else will be using it."

He undressed, down to his tee shirt and jeans, anyway, and they slipped into the bed, beneath a warm down comforter. "The Northwests leave all this?" Wendy asked as Dipper switched off the lamp.

"What, the furniture? Yeah, they had the other house, the farmhouse, and it was all furnished, so most of what was in the mansion went with the building when it was auctioned off to pay Preston's outstanding debts."

"Never slept in a queen-sized bed before," Wendy murmured. "Get over here and hold me."

Dipper cuddled next to her again, and when he put his arm around her and his hand touched her forearm, he felt how sleep-deprived she was. "Go to sleep," he whispered. "I'm here for you."

 _Thanks, Dip. OK, gonna think it to you: Love you, man._

— _Love you, too, Lumberjack Girl._

She fell into an exhausted sleep within a few seconds. This time no dream stirred her—unless the pleasant ones that Dipper had echoed the ones running through her mind. And if they did, so much the better.

* * *

Dipper woke up at a few minutes past six. He'd fallen into the early-rising habit since becoming a runner—most mornings he managed at least thirty minutes of running before getting ready for school. But Wendy was sleeping peacefully, her hand on the pillow cradling her cheek, her long red hair tousled. Dipper slipped quietly out of bed and put on his shoes.

Ford, always early to be up and about, was down in the family kitchen. He had put on a pot of coffee and had found an orange for his breakfast—he rarely ate anything more substantial. "Good morning, Mason," he said. "How is Wendy?"

Dipper poured himself a cup of coffee. "Sleeping, and I thought it was better to let her sleep. Grunkle Ford, she was so worn-out yesterday. Whatever was going on, it kept her from sleeping very much. You know, she believes she was responsible for her dad's accident."

"That's not rational," Ford said. "These things happen."

"I know," Dipper said, sitting beside him at the table. "But she was a little upset with him and told him something like, 'Your leg's not broken!' when he told her to do something that she was too busy for. And then the next day, or the one after, he _did_ break his leg."

"I'm ninety per cent sure that was coincidence," Ford said. "I don't see Wendy as a person who would launch a psychic attack, even subconsciously."

"She's _not_ that kind of person," Dipper said. "Unless that creepy creature was, you know, somehow taking advantage of her."

"I hope not—but I can't categorically rule out the possibility. We'll leave around eleven-thirty," Ford said. "If anything of it remains, I hope we can destroy it."

"Thanks."

They talked of what the thing possibly could be—"I'd say the snake-like manifestation was something summoned from another plane of existence," Ford said. "But that leads to the question of who would call up such a thing." He peeled the orange, its citrus fragrance strong. "It would have to be someone either thoroughly evil, or else completely clueless and careless."

"I have to tell you something," Dipper said.

Ford paused with only a couple of the orange segments eaten as Dipper told him about how in the terrifying darkness Bill Cipher had spoken to them—and how his instructions had made possible his and Wendy's escape from the enveloping darkness. He added, "Bill was a human after the thing let us go. He said he took something from my energy and Wendy's to make itself visible. He told us someone summoned up the creature but might not be able to control it. It looked human, but really was Bill Cipher, Grunkle Ford."

"I believe you. I have had recent communications from a humanized Cipher as well," Ford said slowly. "I wonder what his game is."

"He told me that something called the Axolotl had saved him from being destroyed completely back in Weirdmageddon," Dipper said. "In exchange for his abandoning his plans for taking over our dimension and agreeing to, well, be good."

"Yes, I got that sense, too," Ford said. "And it may well be true. I learned something about the Axolotl while I was traveling through the infinite dimensions. Strong as Bill was, his powers were no match for the Axolotl's. Though I have to admit that I don't know for sure whether the Axolotl itself is completely benign."

"If it wasn't," Dipper said, "it wouldn't have made Bill promise to change his ways, would it?"

"No, certainly not—but we have only Bill's word for that, Mason. And I know Bill from way back. It's also possible that he has ulterior motives, that he's playing a long game for reasons of his own while he re-gathers power. Yet—well, Bill was undeniably responsible for my and Stanley's rejuvenation. He seemed kindly intentioned, though he taunted me much as he did when he was my worst enemy. I don't know. I just don't know."

"I sort of _have_ to trust him," Dipper said. "He saved my life, and I've helped him regain some of his, uh, substance, I guess? And he did this weird thing—kind of an eye exam—with me and Wendy." He told Ford everything, including the fact that Bill had manifested in a disturbingly androgynous form.

"Describe him," Ford said.

Dipper shrugged. "Like I say, he was humanoid, blond, with bushy, spiky hair. His skin was all yellow, like a lemon. He was, uh, a hermaphrodite. Naked, too. His, uh, eye was still, you know—Bill's eye. Almond-shaped, with a yellow iris and a slitted pupil. He just had the one eye." He shrugged. "No bow tie, though, and no hat. Not even underwear! He, uh, said that the form he took, blend of male and female, was our fault, mine and Wendy's, I mean, 'cause he drew from us to manifest physically. When he disappeared, he sort of exploded into yellow dust."

"Interesting. It's true that when supernatural creatures are able to make themselves visible, they draw from the humans around them—that's why elementals, spirits that have never been in a body, sometimes appear in the shape of ghosts known to the humans who witness them. They're pulling their form from the humans' memories of their loved ones. It's possible that Bill picked up on both Wendy's and your psychic fields and so became of—what would we call it? Blended gender?"

"I hope he doesn't stay that way," Dipper muttered. "He, uh, did remind me of Wendy a little. In shape. And he sort of reminded me, well, of me, too."

"He won't likely appear that way again," Ford said. "These manifestations vary from time to time and place to place. One spirit can take on infinite forms. But you said he insisted on looking closely at you?"

"Stared into our eyes. I mean, _he_ had only one eye, but he looked in both of mine and both of Wendy's."

"An eye examination," Ford said reflectively. "Hmm. Suggestive. And what did he conclude?"

"He said we were clean, that the—I'm sorry, he had some word for the Dreamsnake that I can't even remember. It started with a T-L sound, and it was definitely in a foreign language. Anyway, he said that the Dreamsnake hadn't . . . put any darkness inside us."

Ford laid aside his half-eaten orange and got to his feet. "Come with me."

They went into the laboratory—Dr. McGucket wasn't up yet, and Ford said he and his wife usually slept until about eight—and for several minutes, Ford scanned Dipper with three separate devices. "That's a relief. I can't detect any psychic infection," he told Dipper. "Therefore, I must conclude that Bill told you the truth—hard as that is to believe!"

"Could we go back to the kitchen?" Dipper asked. "I'm sort of hungry, and it's past seven now."

They did, and Ford finished his orange and put on a fresh pot of coffee. "The McGuckets say to eat anything you want," he told Dipper. "In fact, I think Mayellen really likes it when Stanley and I enjoy her cooking."

Dipper rummaged around and in a breadbox he found part of a loaf of home-baked bread—puffy and beautifully brown. He began to slice it with a bread knife.

"That's very good," Ford said. "It's a brioche loaf—Mrs. McGucket loves to bake. It may be a little stale, though."

"That's all right," Dipper said. "It needs to be that way for what I plan to make."

He cut the bread into eight slices, then mixed eggs, milk, vanilla extract, sugar, nutmeg, and salt in a wide bowl and melted butter on the grill. He dipped bread slices into the mixture and started to brown them.

"Oh," Ford said, smiling broadly. "French toast! My mother used to cook that."

"Want some?" Dipper asked. "You can have a couple of slices."

Ford inhaled the aroma. "Well—I don't usually have a heavy breakfast these days, but yes, if you have enough yourself."

Dipper grinned. "It's really mostly for Wendy, but yeah, there's plenty."

Dipper gave Ford the first two nicely-browned slices, and Ford found some maple syrup to drizzle over them. While the others were cooking, Dipper got a tray, poured two cups of coffee, tipping just a little cream into each one, and then poured a little of the syrup into what probably was a cream server. He plated the rest of the toast and buttered it—Ford, just finishing his portion, murmured, "It's delicious, thank you"—and carefully carried the tray, with silverware and some napkins, up to his room. He balanced everything precariously while he opened the door and pushed it wide with his knee.

Wendy had turned over in bed, her arm flung out over the light-blue quilted comforter as if she had been seeking him. "Hey," he said softly from the doorway. "Hungry?"

She turned her head, opened sleepy green eyes and looked at him, then grinned. "Oh, dude! Breakfast in bed? You tryin' to seduce me?"

"Nope, not at the moment. Just trying to feed you," Dipper said. "Don't know about you, but I'm starving."

They carefully set the tray on the bed, Dipper climbed in, and they had their breakfast. "God," Wendy said after the first bite, "this is fantastic! You gotta give me the recipe!"

"It's a Pines family tradition, I guess," Dipper told her, smiling at the eager way she ate. "Mom taught it to me. But it's not easy. You have to start by baking a loaf of brioche, and that's practically a chemistry experiment!"

"Mm. You're spoiling me."

As they ate, Dipper asked, "How are you feeling?"

"Lots better," Wendy said. "Finally got more than a couple hours sleep. What time is it, anyway?"

"Pretty close to seven-thirty. Want to do a little run with me?"

"Don't have the gear," she said. "Tomorrow, though, for sure."

When they'd finished, Dipper put all the plates and cups back onto the tray and set it on the bedside table. "I'll take this down later," he said.

They heard Stan grumbling down the hall, and he popped his head through the doorway. Dipper had left it ajar. "You kids behavin'?"

"Nah, we're bein' naughty," Wendy replied. "Dip just served me a fattening breakfast. French toast, dude!"

"Really? Any left?" Stan asked eagerly.

"Sorry, Grunkle Stan," Dipper told him. "We finished it off. Well, we and Ford."

"What did Brainiac do to deserve that?" growled Stan, frowning.

"Got up early," Dipper said.

"Huh. Well, next time save me some. I'll rustle me up somethin'. How you two doin'?"

"A lot better, now that I've got some sleep," Wendy said. "I gotta call and check on Dad. Guess I'll wait until about eight-thirty for that, though."

"Yeah, that'd be good. Hey, Wendy, don't think I told you, but your aunt Sallie is terrifyin'!"

"Well, she married a Bellone, so her name's different," Wendy said, "but she's still a flippin' Corduroy!"

"You grow up just like her, you hear?"

"Try my best!"

"So you have an uncle?" Dipper asked.

"No, Mr. Bellone died ten or twelve years back. He was a lot older'n my aunt, and they didn't ever have children. She was always sorta like a mom to me when I was a kid. An occasional mom, 'cuz I didn't see her all that often." Wendy stretched her arms luxuriously up over her head. "Better get up. Gonna need a shower!"

"I won't take that as an invitation," Dipper said.

"Aww, man!" Wendy said with a mock pout. "I don't guess you got like girly shampoo and all that jazz?"

"Use Mabel's," Dipper said. "There's a kind of tower thing in the shower stall, and the pink bottles on it are, what is it, Crowning Miracle?"

"Hey!" Wendy said. "That's my fave, too. OK, dude, I'll go clean up."

"I'll take the dishes downstairs," Dipper said. "I'll, uh, knock when I get back, just in case you're not dressed."

"You really take the fun out of it," Wendy teased.

* * *

Wendy spoke to her dad at eight-thirty, and Manly Dan was reasonably cheerful for him because the doctor had said he could go stay with Sallie on Monday if he behaved himself until then. He'd start his rehab with a mobile therapist, and if he was still doing well, he'd be able to come back to Gravity Falls by January 5th or 6th, which meant the boys wouldn't miss any school. "Hey, Dad, I talked to Junior, too," he said. "He's gonna come down the weekend before. Your Cousin Steve can do without him until June, so that's fixed."

Wendy promised to drive up to visit Dan as soon as he was installed in Aunt Sallie's guest room, and they said their goodbyes. "We gotta clear all this up before then," she told Dipper, looking grim.

"We'll do it," he promised her.

They postponed lunch until after their investigation of Wendy's house. They again took two cars, Wendy's and Ford's this time—because he had the trunk packed with various arcane paraphernalia that might come in handy. Wendy had locked the door—"How'd you guys get in last night?" she asked Stan and Ford.

Stan grinned. "Ask me no questions, I won't tell you that I jimmied the lock with my pocket knife. It's a pretty good deadbolt, by the way—took me about two minutes!"

Dipper thought of his Christmas present for Grunkle Stan. Too bad he hadn't given that to him earlier.

Though all the lights were still on in the Corduroy house, the heat was off, and Wendy switched on the thermostat. "Let it warm up a little before we start," she said.

They sat in the living room, Stan and Ford on the loveseat, Wendy and Dipper in armchairs, and Ford asked, "Now, exactly how did you manage to dismember that creature?"

Wendy held out her arm. "This and these," she said, showing the bracelet and earrings. "They became, like, lasers or some biz. I mean they shot out this really bright green light, and that tore it apart."

"Yeah, we saw the light when we first drove in," Stan said. "Thought the place was burnin' down or something."

"May I?" Ford asked, reaching to examine the bracelet.

Wendy took it off and handed it to him. "Dipper gave me this and the earrings," she said.

"Hm. Emeralds. A variety of beryl, the color created by chromium and perhaps vanadium. These are genuine, too."

"Oh, man!" Wendy said. "Dip, my birthstone! How did you know?"

"Easy enough to look up," Dipper said, blushing.

"What's the deal with 'em?" Stan asked.

Ford handed the bracelet back and frowned in thought. "Well, there are many teachings about the psychic properties of gemstones—"

"I'm already sorry I asked!" Stan said. "Cut to the chase, Professor!"

With a shake of his head, Ford said, "I can't because I don't know the specifics. However, supposedly emeralds promote psychic ability and boost talents like clairvoyance and telepathy. According to Yogic teachings, the light of an emerald represents the heart chakra—it's the highest and purest form of love energy."

"Bill Cipher hinted something about that," Dipper said. "But—emeralds don't shine with their own light, and inside that thing there wasn't any other light!"

Ford smiled. "It is possible," he said gently, "that the stones picked up your strong feelings for each other and used that energy to save you both."

Wendy reached for Dipper's hand and squeezed it. "Oh, dude!"

"Well-p!" Stan said, getting up. "House is warmer, so let's find this cockamamie thing from another world and kick its freakin' ass!" He winked at Wendy and said, " _Mademoiselle, pardonnez mon français_! Hah! I had French in high school, too, a million years ago! How's my accent, Poindexter?"

"It would get you booted out of any restaurant in Paris," Ford said.

Stan chuckled. "Yeah, I always thought the only French I'd need if I ever went over there was " _Garçon! Oo est la damn toilette_? Ya need help hauling your junk in, Ford?"

"If you don't mind."

They brought in two banged-up and black-enameled aluminum cases bigger than a standard suitcase, and Ford unpacked them. "Mason, you know how to run the anomaly scanner. Do a sweep of every room and let me know what you find."

"Comin' with you, man," Wendy said.

They checked her brothers' bedroom, her father's, the bathroom, the living room, the kitchen-dinette, even the loft and attic. Nothing. "Your room," Dipper said.

Wendy took a deep breath. "Let's do it."

They stood in the doorway and Dipper switched on the device. The screen pulsed and gave a readout. "Grunkle Ford!" Dipper yelled.

Ford, gripping a pistol version of the quantum destabilizer—the kind he called a disruptor—came up behind him. "I suspected you'd find something here, if anywhere. What are the figures?"

"Psychic intrusion's at forty," Dipper said. "Reality quotient is .232."

"What's that mean?" Stan asked. He didn't have a disruptor, but he wielded a baseball bat.

"That something from another reality has been here recently," Ford said. "Sweep the room and see if the signal's constant all around."

No. It peaked when Dipper pointed the sensor wand at the closet. "I think it came from there," he said.

Wendy nodded, her face so pale that her freckles stood out. "Yeah. The Dreamsnake always crawled out of there. S'pose it's in there now?"

"We'll find out."

Ford opened the closet door. Nothing. "We'll have to take everything out," he said.

Wendy's clothes hung on a rod. She and Stanley took them and their hangers down by armloads and laid them on her bed, until everything was out. At one point she stooped and picked up something from the floor at the foot of the bed—torn wrapping paper, striped red like a peppermint candy cane. She smiled and quickly kissed Dipper on the cheek, not letting either of the older Pines twins notice.

Her shoes and boots were on the floor of the closet, arranged in neat pairs. She moved these, too, and sniffed. "Something smells really bad in here," she said.

Ford asked, "What's up on the shelf?"

"Odds and ends. Want me to get the little stepladder from the kitchen?"

"If you don't mind."

While she went for it, Stan shone a flashlight in—the closet was pretty deep and dark. "What's that?" he asked, directing the light into the left corner.

Behind him, Wendy said, "Oh, man! What _is_ that? Looks like fungus!"

In the corner of the closet, a faintly glossy black streak, looking like old burned motor oil or dried paint, had flowed down from the underside of the high shelf. In the light it had a strange pebbly texture, almost like scorched, dried oatmeal. It reached all the way to the floor, though it thinned on the way down and had not pooled.

"Something on the shelf, all right," Ford said. He handed the disruptor to Dipper. "Cover me. If anything jumps out, hit it with a shot. That setting should stun anything up to a Class Ten gorgon."

Dipper swallowed hard. He gripped the pistol-like weapon. The stench that Wendy had noticed, a sickly smell like moldy, worm-riddled earth, made him queasy.

Ford took things off the shelf and handed them one by one to Stan—some shoe boxes, an old purse, a pair of rawhide work gloves—and then said, "I see it. It's in the corner—a corrupt-looking black lump of something. Stanley, get me the yellow rubber gloves and the long tongs from the smaller case."

They heard Stan fumbling around. He brought back the requested items. "Here ya go. Be careful."

Ford donned the heavy six-fingered gloves. "I will be. Now let's see if this thing is stuck to the wood—no, I have it. Stanley, keep the flashlight up here toward the left. Here it comes."

He pulled the tongs out. They clutched something lumpy and blistered, black and nasty-looking, about six inches square by one deep. "What _is_ that?" Wendy asked.

"Let's take it out into the daylight."

They did—though the daylight wasn't much, a gray sheen through a cloud layer that misted rain down on them.

"Now I kinda remember that thing," Wendy said. "But it's all corroded-looking now—oh, my God! I know! I tossed that up there 'cuz I wanted to forget it! Know what it is, Dip?"

Dipper shook his head.

"Man! That's the case for the CD that Robbie gave me that one time! The one with—"

"The back-masking!" Dipper said. "The one with the song that tried to hypnotize you!"

"Yeah. The case was like leather or something, shaped like a monster face. Dude!" she asked, her voice shaking. "The Dreamsnake—man, could Robbie be behind all this? Could he have sent it after me? _Robbie_?"

Grimly, Ford said, "We have to do something quickly. I can feel this object pulsing. Somehow—not in any normal way, but somehow—this thing is _alive_!"


	13. Chapter 13

**13: The Cost of Magic**

* * *

In a language not clearly related to his own, nor to English, the researcher cried out as he knelt in a pitch-dark room. The chant took some time, and he felt that time was quickly running out. As though his life depended on it (and it did), he hurried through the anti-spell:

" _Luopuisin siteisteni pimeyden palvelijalle!_

 _Leikkasin sen kuuliaisuuden johdot!_

 _Vapahin palvelija! En enää pidä sitä!_

 _Minulla ei ole minkäänlaista vaatimusta!_

 _Kaiken pahan päällikkö, kuule rukoukseni!_

 _Tee oma tahtosi!_

 _Vapaa minut tästä loitsusta!_

 _Leikkaa tämä solmu! Vetoan verestäni!_

 _Vannon ruumiini! Vetoan palveluni_!"

Pain like fire flooded his veins and pulsed in his brain. A frozen dread counterbalanced the fever. He felt as though a cold ghostly hand had reached into his chest and taken hold of his beating heart, and squeezed, and squeezed.

Groaning, he continued to speak the words, to weave the web of spell.

 _A mind hard enough, cold enough, ruthless enough, could master the darkest magic._

But things bought always had to be paid for, and the pain was the coin of spellcasting. Years before, how many, two score and more, maybe, he had cast the first spell to summon and then bind the T'klatlumodh, called by some the Bearer of Darkness, to his mind and to seal it in the leather skin of the case. The leather had been made from, well—from human flesh. That had been the hardest magic he had ever wrought.

This new spell, the anti-spell, would cut the connections between master and servant—

Unless it was already too late. If the enemies, the members of the Circle, knew of some way to destroy the T'klatlumodh, and if they did it before he could say the words, slash his arm, and spatter his blood on the sigils he had chiseled into the stone floor, the researcher would himself die, for the slave would revenge itself upon the master and they would mutually annihilate each other.

However, if he succeeded, the T'klatlumodh might, it was true, in its fierce freedom break loose and slay the girl of cool nerve, the boy of the pine tree—unless they were canny enough to know that light held it and weakened it. But if it fed on them and slaughtered them, that was not the end. They might die, but years would pass, and others would come to replace them, for his studies said there always was a Zodiac of power.

He had to live to see the replacements arise, though. He had to survive what was about to happen. He finished the chant in a voice so loud that it tore his throat (but his home was in a mausoleum from which he had callously evicted the skeletons, and for a square mile around, only the dead lay deep, and earth stopped their ears and they could not hear).

He plunged into his left forearm the sharp obsidian _tecpatl_ (a sacrificial knife, this one dating from a time before Europeans had discovered the New World, a deadly blade first used to cut a virgin's living heart from her body as she lay at midnight upon the altar at Teotihuacán and the priest consecrated it to the god of the dark moon).

Blood leapt from a punctured artery and sprayed on the incised figures in the stone floor: The Watcher from the Shadows; the Beast of Abominations; the All-Seeing Eye; the Mistress of Secrets; and the two Mysteries, whose deadly true names were never written or spoken.

Then, shivering, exhausted, the researcher bound up the wound in the pale blue light of six black, twisted corpse-candles and then, losing his strength, fell to the floor and curled in a fetal position on the cold, hard stone, in the center of the circle of glyphs, all freshly blood-marked. If his spell had been successful, he would live. If not—

Death would come.

But not quickly, and not with mercy.

The six candles all simultaneously guttered. Six red sparks flickered and died.

And in the darkness and in the cold he lay and waited.

* * *

"Shoot the dang thing with your gun!" Stan said.

"It's not that easy, Stanley!" Ford insisted as he drove. "One mistake, and instead of destroying it, we'd unleash it! Keep the flashlight steady on it, Mason!"

In the back seat, Dipper tried his best. They had deposited the corrupt black mess in a glass mixing bowl, where it lay twitching. The ultra-bright flashlight (invented by Fiddleford) pinned it down and seemed to hold it in place.

But Ford was still a somewhat erratic driver, and he was still wearing the yellow gloves, which sometimes made the steering wheel slip a little in his grasp, and Dipper bounced around as the Lincoln made the turns. What would happen if the thing got jarred out of the bowl, maybe landing in his lap? He didn't like to speculate.

They parked in front of the Shack, and a couple of seconds later, Wendy pulled her Dodge Dart in behind them. As he got out in the cold drizzle of rain, Ford yelled to her: "Go unlock the Shack—gift shop door! If Soos, Melody, or Abuelita are in there, get them out. Stanley, you go inside and open the secret door! Mason, give that to me. You and Wendy can wait up here."

"No," Dipper said as Ford took both the bowl and the flashlight from him. "I'm seeing this through."

Wendy had the door open, and Stan had dashed inside. "Coast's clear," Stan called, reappearing. "I'll run and put the code in the vending machine."

By the time Dipper and Ford reached it, the machine had swiveled to reveal the stairs leading down to the laboratory levels—the one part of the Shack where Soos had never ventured since the day Ford had returned.

"Let me go first," Dipper said. "I'll get the lights."

"Very well. Stan, you keep watch up here."

"Gotcha."

In the glow from the intense flashlight beam behind him, Dipper ran down and reached the bottom of the stairs and turned on the light. He had never quite figured out why Ford, undeniably a smart guy, had not put a light switch at the top of the stairs, too—though usually the secret door closed slowly enough for someone to pick his way down safely before all illumination was cut off.

Dipper turned left and flipped another light switch. Fluorescents flickered on, their cold white illumination showing the ante-level. They were heading down one more, and they took the elevator.

"Wendy," Ford said as the three got in, "you'd be safer upstairs."

"Yeah, so would you and Dipper," she said. "Maybe I can help."

The elevator doors opened, and the three got out on the level where Ford had once stored his collection of Bill Cipher images and memorabilia. Now in a niche the prototype of the dimensional portal that he and Fiddleford had crafted waited. "Power it up, Dipper," he said. "Wendy, take this bowl and carefully set it on the counter there. I'm going to keep this light on it."

Dipper settled in at a keyboard and used the computer to fire up the miniature Portal—too small for him, or anyone older than a year or so, to fit through, but able to breach the walls between dimensions and allow a peek into alternate universes—or for passing notes back and forth, for that matter.

"All right," Ford said as Wendy steadied the bowl on the counter. "Mason, key in these numbers: Negative eight. Return. Negative twelve. Return. Zero. Then the letters X, L, N, D. Is it working?"

"Uh—yeah. Really bright light showing," Dipper said.

Sure enough, a white glare streamed from the miniature Portal, brighter than a searchlight beam, forcing Dipper to shield his eyes with a forearm. "Good. That should hold it," Ford said. "Wendy, see the workbench against the wall there? Open the—let me see—the second wide drawer from the top, there in the middle. Yes, that one. Find the tongs, please. Thank you. Stand back."

"Let me shine the flashlight on it, man," Wendy said.

"All right. Take it from me and keep the light on it—good!"

Stanford took the tongs as Wendy took the flashlight. "This the way?" Wendy asked.

"Just right. All right, I'm clamping the tongs on the artifact. Got it. I'm going to walk slowly to the Portal, Wendy. Keep in step with me, and don't take the flashlight beam off it. Here we go, slowly, starting with your left foot. Left. Right. Left. Right. Left. Right. Left, and stop. Mason, stand by to shut off the power when I tell you. Here we go—now!"

He whipped the tongs with their squirming black payload into the portal and gave them a shove, sending tongs and artifact through the opening. "Turn it off!"

Dipper hit the switch. For a half-second, the Portal flashed all colors of the spectrum, and then some, and it crackled as the light faded, giving off an odor like the ozone that a near-hit by a lightning bolt can leave. Now they could see through the circular opening to the concrete wall—the Portal was once more just an empty hoop.

"We did it," Ford said. He stripped off the heavy yellow gloves—and they disintegrated into ribbons, as though made of crepe paper instead of industrial-grade insulating rubber. "It was sending out malign power," he observed. "Look at these." He flaked the remnants of the gloves off his hands.

"Did—we kill it, dude?" Wendy asked.

Ford shrugged, taking out a handkerchief and wiping his hands. "Who knows? Maybe it _can't_ die. But we trapped it in an empty dimension, one with nothing in it but constant fierce light. It can't bear light. If that doesn't destroy it, and I think it probably will, at least the light will contain it within its case—forever, if we're lucky! Are you all right, Mason?"

"Yeah," Dipper said, remembering to breathe. "But I'm glad you got rid of it before the gloves failed. Did you toss the tongs in with it? I couldn't see for the glare."

"I did. The first pair corroded within minutes—that's why I borrowed the mixing bowl, Wendy. Glass is usually more resistant than metal."

"Yeah, well, I'm tossin' that one, man. I'll buy a new one. I'm not mixing any food up in the bowl that thing was in."

"Good thinking," Ford said. Then he went to his workbench and checked the room with an anomaly detector. "Just residual readings, already fading," he said. He scanned his own hands, too, and then both the teens. "We're good, too. No trace of an alien presence."

"Alien?" Wendy asked.

Ford switched off the detector and hung it back on the pegboard behind his work bench. "In the sense of an intrusion into our reality, I mean. Not necessarily from another planet. Let's go upstairs. We'll have to go back to your house and perform a cleansing ritual before sunset—I know one that will work. But also, I think it's crucial to learn who, or what, was behind this attack. We need to plan our next move."

"At least we fixed the Dreamsnake good." Wendy reached for Dipper's hand. "You OK there, man?"

He nodded, squeezing her hand back. _Sorry I had to give you your Christmas present early._

 _No sweat, Dipper! I love them!_

Aloud, Dipper said, "Anyway, I'm just glad it's over."

* * *

 _It wasn't over._

In the mausoleum, the researcher felt the ripping pain as the T'klatlumodh departed the physical universe for—something, somewhere else. Its mindless fury clawed at him. Had it been able to manifest, it would have ripped him to pieces, keeping him alive and suffering to the last possible second.

But—it was gone.

 _How had they banished it? Curse them, their powers must be great!_

Its Summoning had cost him a great deal. Now—he wanted payback.

Shaking, weak, the researcher dragged himself across the bloodied stone floor and in the darkness pulled himself up by grasping the chair and hauling his body up as if he were climbing a ladder. As far as he could sense (and now that the servant had been banished, he could sense nothing directly), the two representatives from the Zodiac lived. And—perhaps another one? Or two, possibly even more? It was all hopelessly dim and shapeless in his mind now.

 _Could only two of them defeat the Bearer of Darkness? What manner of sorcerer was he dealing with?_

Or maybe—yes, he felt there had to be more than two of them. Were they . . . gathering?

Was the magic in them wild? Did it use them as instruments without their knowing it? Or did they know, or at least suspect, what power they might all together wield?

 _Did they know about him?_

They might. He could not allow that.

He would _have_ to find them now. Have to defeat, subdue, and enslave them. Or, failing that, to kill them, all at once or one by one.

It would be hellishly hard. It might take years.

But now—now it was a matter of survival.

With trembling fingers, he struck a match—he was too drained to summon infernal fire—and lit one of the black candles, then a second one. In the flickering blue light, he found a shard of the magic mirror he had broken and in it studied his face.

The magic had gaunted him. He now looked dead, a week-old corpse at least, pale cheeks fallen, eye sockets deep and dark.

The cost was always high for dark sorceries.

He would have to rest and gather strength again. _Must heal, perhaps for months._

Then he would set about finding where they were, cool-headed girl, pine-tree boy. Oh, yes, he would somehow find them. That was inevitable.

Just wait.

Just . . . wait.


	14. Chapter 14

**14: Cleaning Up**

* * *

In Stanford's lab stood the prototypes of his newer, portable scanning devices. He had Wendy hold still for three separate scans, the last in a kind of small booth—she fit, but her dad would have had a severe problem jamming himself in.

Luckily, there was no need for that. Stanford scanned the gauges and readouts, switched off the sensors, and said, "Fine, Wendy. You can come out now."

"What's the verdict, Doc?" she asked as she opened the booth door—it was a little like an old-fashioned telephone booth, the kind Clark Kent misses every day of his life—and stepped out.

Stanley, behind his brother and leaning on a desk, said, "You're pregnant! Hah!"

"Hey!" Dipper yelled angrily.

But Wendy shrugged it off with a chuckle. "Now, _that_ would be a miracle!" she said. "Chill, Dip, he's just joking."

"I don't like that kind of joke," Dipper grumbled.

"I take it back! Sheesh, kid!"

"If I may," Stanford said over the quibbling, "Wendy, you are free of any ghostly or alien influences. I don't know what the Dreamsnake—"

"T'klatlumodh," Wendy said, though her tongue stumbled on the word.

"What?" Ford asked.

Wendy repeated, "T'klatlumodh. That's what Bill Cipher called it."

"Bill Cipher!" snarled Stanley. "I punched that yellow freak demon to smithereens! He's got a lotta nerve survivin'!"

"Now, now," Ford said. "From all I can learn, Cipher's not a threat to us. In fact, he seems to be on the side of the kids." He pulled a bound pad from his pocket and clicked a pen. "I wonder how that's spelled. Say it very slowly."

Wendy did, and Ford carefully wrote down _T-KLA TL(lat fric)_ UHMO T? _(th-uv? d? dh?)._ Beneath that, he wrote several stabs at the word: T K LATL-UMOT. T K LATL-UMOD. T-K LA TL-UHM OTH.

Standing at his elbow, Dipper glanced at Wendy. "How'd you remember that?"

Wendy shrugged. "Got a good memory for pronunciation. Mrs. McKenzie—she's my French teacher, and she _is_ French, despite being married to a Scot—says I'm a natural at learnin' spoken languages. If I could only learn how to spell them!"

Dipper asked, "Are you sure he didn't say, uh, TL-KLATL AHMOTE? I thought it started with a TL sound."

"Nope, not how I remember it," Wendy said. "But he had this strange kinda pause between the T and the K. Let me see if I can do it better: T'klatlumodh."

On his pad, Ford wrote T'KLATLMODTH. "Looks like Nahuatl," he mused. "Could possibly be Mayan, though, or maybe some lost language. I'll see what I can track down."

"Track it down after we eat something, OK?" Stan asked. "It's past two!"

"Yeah, I'm hungry, Stan dudes," Wendy said. "Take a girl to lunch?"

Though Abuelita protested, the elder Pines twins did take Dipper and Wendy out to eat—at Los Hermanos Brothers, not the worst restaurant in town, but not the best, either. Dipper was glad to see that Wendy's appetite was returning. When they finished, she said, "Now I'm goin' back to my house to see if I can scrub that gross crap off my closet wall."

"I'll go with you," Dipper said.

Stan glanced at his brother. "Ford?"

"Hm? Oh, I think it's safe. Readings are within normal margin of error for Gravity Falls. However, it might be good if you went along—and take the disruptor pistol, just in case."

"Yeah, an' my Louisville Slugger, just in double case," he said. "You kids go over in Wendy's car, and I'll follow in Ford's. He's gonna stay buried down here the rest of the afternoon. I can tell. Right, Ford?"

"Hm? Fine, fine, yes, whatever you're having," Ford said vaguely. He had opened the secret door and was about to disappear into his lab rooms again.

Stan shook his head as he watched the vending machine swing back into place. "Brilliant guy, but he's got the attention span of a drunk goldfish. OK, knuckleheads, let's go."

* * *

Dipper sat next to Wendy in her Dart as they headed out to the Corduroy house, the day a little darker, the windshield wipers sweeping the glass monotonously. "You're feeling better?" Dipper asked.

"Yeah, dude. Sleep helped more'n anything, but getting some food down was good, too. Want to run up to Morris with me tomorrow afternoon? You can meet my aunt—and I know Dad'll want to thank you for helping me with the house."

"As, uh, long as he doesn't want to, you know, cross-examine me," Dipper said. "I mean, if we told him we'd slept in the same bed—"

"Maybe I _ought_ to," Wendy said in a slow, teasing drawl. "'Course, we Corduroys don't believe in shotgun weddings, but we do use an axe instead of a Remington 12-gauge. Might be nice to rile Dad up so we could get it over with once and for all!"

Dipper asked, "Uh—is the axe to force me to marry you or to chop off my head?"

"Your choice, dude!" she said cheerfully. They both laughed.

"It would be worth it to me," Dipper said with a sigh. "If I was, you know. Little older. But—no. Not yet."

With a note of sweet sadness in her voice, Wendy agreed: "Yeah. Not yet." As they made the turn up the mountain, in a softer, sadder voice, she said, "Dipper? You know, I felt weird when you brought me breakfast in bed. I mean, I loved it, it was real sweet of you, and the food was great, don't get me wrong, but something kept nagging at my memory. I finally got what it was. The last time I had breakfast in bed."

"When was that?" Dipper asked.

Her voice had become low, just above a whisper. "Um, I was, I guess, about five. And I had the flu. And my—my Mom was—well, she was real sick by then. But she came and brought me a tray so I could have breakfast in bed and sat beside me and put her hand on my cheek and told me I'd get well soon. And, and, well, I did, but—but by that time she'd gone to the hospital and, um, she—didn't come back, you know?"

"I'm so sorry," Dipper said.

"Don't be sorry, man. You didn't know. And breakfast in bed—it's a way of sayin' 'I love you.' Just that, um, nobody, you know, has ever said it to me that way for all these years. But you did. And it meant a lot to me, dude. So don't be sorry."

They parked in the Corduroy yard, and a moment later Stan followed them in and got out of the Stanleymobile. The rain was heavier, a cold, thin, steady shower, and Dipper hunched a little deeper in his new coat. "Let's go do it," Wendy said.

She unlocked and opened the door, and they went straight to her bedroom. Stan climbed up on the stepladder—they hadn't moved it—and shone his flashlight on the now-empty shelf. "Nothin' here but some little dust bunnies and a kind of blackish puddle, like tar with tiny little pebbles stuck in it. How we want to tackle this?"

"Man, I'm equipped," Wendy said. "Come on, Dip. Help me carry stuff."

From a pantry on the back porch they took two squeegees on foot-long handles—"Not many people use these," Wendy said, "but, dude, let me tell you they take hours off of cleaning"—a plastic bucket, two big sponges with one soft and one abrasive side, and three different kinds of cleanser. Wendy filled the bucket with hot water and then lugged it into her room.

The first cleansing product, a spray type with ammonia, worked fine. She saturated the splotch in the corner of the shelf, then reached in with a squeegee and raked. The muck came off in a sticky, grainy mess, like sawdust in molasses, and they cleaned that up with paper towels, which Dipper dropped into a plastic garbage bag, the sharp ammonia scent making him twitch his nose. Then they attacked the drip down the back of the closet. It came off, too—though it brought streaks of paint off with it. "Oh, man!" Wendy complained. "Now I gotta stop at the hardware store on the way home from Morris tomorrow and get some eggshell white paint to touch this up!"

"Quart oughta do to touch this up," Stan said. "Dip can come over and help you paint." He inhaled, his big orange nose twitching. "Leastways, it smells a whole lot better now. Smells clean."

"Leave my stuff piled on the bed," Wendy said as she packed up everything. "I'll get the closet shelf and wall painted tomorrow, give that a day to dry, and then hang everything back up. OK to sleep over with Dipper again, Stan?"

"It's getttin' to be a habit," Stan said with a grin. "Yeah, OK with me. Let's keep it a secret from the McGuckets, though, OK? And Dan, of course."

"Yep," Wendy agreed. "Not gonna say a word about any of this to Dad." She mimed zipping her lip, and Dipper felt his heart grow warm.

They put the cleaning supplies back in the pantry, locked it, and Wendy turned the thermostat low. "Think we can turn off the lights now?" Dipper asked her.

She nodded. "Yeah, might as well. If we got rid of the Dreamsnake by tossing it through that Portal, it ought to be OK now. But I'm gonna want to wait for two-three days to move back in. That thing scared the crap out of me."

She left the thermostat on a minimum heat setting, and they drove back to Fiddleford's mansion, pausing only to toss the plastic trash bag with its load of fouled paper towels in a dumpster behind a gas station.

At the mansion, they visited with Fiddleford and Mayellen for a couple of hours, learning about Mayellen's plans for the wedding reception—which they wanted to have there—and Fiddleford's latest inventions. And the McGuckets asked about Wendy and her family. "So, Dan's gonna come back in January?" Fiddleford asked. "And Junior's a-comin' home for a spell? Gonna be as crowded in your house as a turkey pen in November, ain't it?"

"Well," Wendy said, "Junior's going to sleep in my room until Dad's up and around again and Junior can go back north to his job. That'll be along in the early summer, the doctors say. Until then, Soos and Melody tell me I can stay in the Shack. Abuelita's going back to Mexico right after the big wedding—she can't stand these cold winters—and Melody will need some help. She's four months along now."

"Wait, what?" Dipper asked, blinking. "Soos is going to have another baby?"

"Hah! Dipper, I gotta have the talk with you," Stan said. "That ain't exactly the way it works!"

"He and Melody are having another baby," Wendy corrected, smiling. "Didn't you know that? And this one's a girl. Melody is real excited."

"They didn't tell me," Dipper said, feeling just a little hurt.

"Well, at the end of summer they were just starting to think maybe it would happen," Wendy told him. "Probably Melody didn't want to jump the gun. Surprised you didn't notice at Thanksgiving, though—she's starting to show."

"Soos will be over the moon," Dipper said, smiling as that cheerful thought wiped out his momentary pang.

Stan grinned. "I gotta admit, the big lunkhead's a good poppa! Almost makes me feel like I'm gettin' grandkids of my own. Ya know, Soos changed the name of his boat—no, don't guess you noticed it, 'cause it must've been August or September when he did. It's no longer the _Cool Dude._ Now it's the _Cool Dad!_ "

"Yeah, and he's plannin' to add on to the Shack again," Wendy said. "A room for Little Soos, and then a nursery for the new baby. Gonna build out from their bedroom, toward the woods."

"He'll need Dan's help for that," Stan said.

"Well—Soos will get his architect to draw up the plans, and then he'll hire Dad on. They won't start to build until after the thaw, so Dad can at least come over to supervise. Junior and the crew and Soos will do all the work, I guess, unless there's something fairly easy for Dad to do. What's wrong, Dipper?"

He blinked. "Huh? Nothing! I mean, I'm happy for Soos and Melody—he wants seven kids, you know—but, well—every time he changes the Shack in some way, it makes me feel sort of like I miss the good old days. When you'd break your neck going up the rotten stairs in the dark, you know!"

"Things change, Dip," Stan said softly. "Things change."

"And be grateful fer them rare occasions when they change for the better!" Fiddleford put in brightly.

Mayellen assured Wendy she was welcome to stay with them for a couple of days. "It's no trouble. Mabel's room is right there," she said. "Oh, I forgot. You stayed there last night!"

"Um, the bed's all made up and everything," Wendy said truthfully. "So, yeah. I can, um, you know, when I get ready to move into the Shack, I can wash everything. I'm used to that."

"Shucks!" Fiddleford said. "No need fer that! I'll send my collectimivator robot up t' gather all the laundry an' linens, then my Sortabot will separate the colors and the whites an' all, and the Washadryamajig'll have everything clean, dry, pressed, an' folded in less than an hour!"

"I may want to see about buying some of those inventions from you," Wendy said, smiling.

* * *

Ford came back at dinner. He wasn't ready yet to talk about his researches into the T'klatlumodh—"I'm pretty sure there's no rush," he said—and he told them that he and Stanley would be busy the next day, Monday, December 22. "Wedding preparations," he explained. "Wendy, will you be all right for the drive up to Morris?"

"Oh, yeah," she said. "Dipper's going with me."

"Watch out for Aunt Sallie," Stan warned him. "She's feisty!"

"She's a Corduroy," Dipper said, smiling at Wendy.

Oddly, that night both Wendy and he turned shy. "Maybe I better go sleep in Mabel's room," she said.

"Uh, sure, if you want to," Dipper told her. "I, uh, I understand."

"Hey, Dip," she said softly, "man, thank you so much for the Christmas present. And I saw that peppermint wrapping paper on the floor of my room. Too bad I had to unwrap it in the dark. I hate that you didn't get to give it to me where I could show you how much I love it."

"Well, that's all right. Uh, I wanted to get you something, you know—that would be as pretty as you are," Dipper told her.

"Man, that reminds me. When we get back from Morris, I gotta do some Christmas shopping! Want to go with me?"

"Sure," he said. "It's a date."

He turned in early—like Wendy, he needed to catch up on sleep—and lay in the dark just being grateful—for his uncles, for his sister, and right now, especially for Wendy. He had a couple of small presents for her, but he decided that when they went shopping, he'd be on the alert for something else he might get her. The room was pleasantly cool. The tapping of rain on the windowpanes came quiet and soothing.

Feeling peaceful, he fell asleep, on his back, under the down comforter, in just his underwear.

Until he heard a door open and muzzily opened his eyes in the dark. "Mmh?" he asked, not too coherently. The rain seemed lighter, but he could still hear it, and the steady drips from the eaves. "Who is it?"

The bed jounced a little. "Well, Mabel's bed's been kinda occupied now," Wendy whispered. "For, like, nearly a whole hour. And I kept thinking of you in here and couldn't really go to sleep. So for the rest of the night—OK if I cuddle next to you again?"

"Always," he said.

She leaned in and kissed him, and then she slipped beneath the covers and they lay close together, hugging each other, sharing thoughts and later dreams, both of them warm and happy and being good.

* * *

At midnight, in another time zone, the researcher, his arm still bandaged, held a string made of the plaited hair of a hanged woman. At the end of it he had tied a weight—a black incisor tooth, taken from the jaw of a creature not of this world.

From beneath a tall table he had dragged a massive globe of the Earth, one manufactured in France in the year 1883 and so not showing the present contours of countries. In fact, it had darkened so much that it was difficult—not impossible, but very hard—to make out the ornate lettering: _Afrique. Asie. Amerique du Nord._

The researcher straightened the globe in its stand so North was due up. Then he held the tooth on the end of its string and recited a spell of finding. It was a minor spell, and its cost was low—blisters on his fingers that would last for a week, perhaps.

The pendulum began to move without his conscious effort. It swung in a circle, widening. With his free hand, the researcher slowly turned the globe, tilting it with each revolution. When the North Pole had inclined to about forty-five degrees, the pendulum began to narrow its circle and, paradoxically, to speed up.

And then, as if it were a nail in the invisible grip of a strong magnet, it stood straight out, pointing. Slowly, slowly, the researcher turned the globe—until the spot to which the tooth pointed was on the topmost curve. No matter how he moved the free end of its tether, it swiveled and pointed straight at a spot in _Amerique du Nord_ , a spot in the Pacific Northwest of the United States.

The scale wasn't large enough for him to pinpoint the exact location, but—he had an area.

A place to begin the search.

He let go of the string, and the sharp tooth daggered into the leather-covered globe and stuck there.

 _That far away,_ he thought. The distance would make for a long journey. It would take months for him to arrange things and find a means of traveling and money to see him through. Perhaps a year, two years.

But—

"I will have them," he whispered.

On the fingers of his right hand, five blisters rose, dark with the purplish-red color of stagnant, corrupt blood.


	15. Chapter 15

**15: Clearing Skies**

* * *

 **From the Journals of Dipper Pines, Deciphered from his Vigenere Code #17:** _Monday, December 22: It is so nice to wake up next to Wendy! Though I have to admit, being so close to her and yet staying within the limits is, well, painful. She shook me awake just before six and said, "Run today?"_

" _Umm, yeah," I told her. "Give me a minute."_

 _So, she went into Mabel's room and got into her sweatpants and sweatshirt—she had brought them and her cross-trainers over from her house in a shopping bag—and I got dressed out, too._

 _It was cold outside! Thirty-seven when we first stepped out, but at least the rain had stopped. "OK," she said, "we'll take it easy this morning 'cuz you have to get used to runnin' in cold weather again. How about a mile and a half?"_

 _I thought I could do that, so we ran—well, jogged, keeping to an easy pace—down the driveway, along the road, to the town center and then back again. Under the street lights, I could see our breath._

 _When you're used to running nearly every day and you knock off for four in a row, you get tired quickly! This run was nothing—we've done five miles many times at faster speed—but I got a little winded going back up the long steep driveway. We went back upstairs and threw ourselves on my bed and lay there holding hands._

 _And talked, in our silent, telepathic way._

* * *

As they lay side by side, Dipper sensed Wendy's unspoken words: _Hey, Dip? You still game for driving up with me to see Dad?_

— _Of course!_

 _Mind if we go, like, after breakfast instead of waiting? I've got to paint the closet and all, and I do want to get in some shopping._

— _That's fine with me._

 _Thanks, man. Uh, Dipper? Don't get embarrassed, man, but—are you OK?_

— _What do you mean?_

 _Um. Last night I kept getting flashes of your dreams. The ones that featured the two of us. Pretty, ah, explicit!_

Dipper's face felt hot. In fact, he could recall some vivid dreams of himself and Wendy, going further in their relationship than they ever had in waking life.

— _Sorry. It's just that us being so close—and you know I want you._

 _Yeah, I do. So—hurt your feelings if we don't sleep in the same bed tonight? Hey, I felt that just now—a little pang and then, what? Relief?_

— _No. I mean, not really relief. Well—you know I'll miss you. But you're right, it's probably smarter. After all the scare was over, I—I don't know, just feeling relieved that you're all right—that made me start to think of, uh, you know, other things._

 _Tell you the truth, I've been doin' some of that kinda thinking myself, man. And it gets pretty stimulating, if you know what I mean. So—we'll cool it some, OK?_

— _That's what we ought to do._

 _I can tell that was difficult for you to think. Love you, man. Thanks for understanding, Dip._

* * *

"You want the shower first?" she asked aloud.

"No, you go ahead. I'll just, you know, lie here in bed and, um—"

She kissed the tip of his nose. "And get comfortable, yeah. I understand."

Ten minutes later, she tapped on the connecting door and said, "Shower's free, Dip!"

"Thanks."

He got up and showered—he needed it—and then thought about the future. _Their_ future. One day—and it looked like it would be only about two and a half years off now—oh, well. Tough it out, as Wendy had once said. Tough it out, man!

When they were dressed—and Wendy had packed her dirty clothes in the tote bag to keep the robot from collecting them—they went down to breakfast. Both Stan and Ford were already up by that time, and Wendy cheerfully offered to cook. "Gonna get out of practice," she said. "You Pines guys have to leave soon?"

"No," Ford said. "Not until nine, so we have two hours."

"You starvin'?"

"I could eat," Stanley said. "Unless you're plannin' something that's worth the wait."

"Oh, I am," she said. "So—let me try something special!"

She pre-heated an oven, and Dipper volunteered to help her. His first job was making pancakes on the griddle while she sautéed chopped tomatoes, onions, and peppers. As they were cooking, she washed and then thinly sliced some red potatoes. And as Dipper took up the pancakes and she let the tomato mixture cool down, she mixed up milk, eggs, pepper, and salt.

Then she took a shallow casserole dish, oiled it with olive oil, and put in a layer of potatoes, then the tomato mixture, then more potatoes. From the enormous fridge she took out a package of breakfast-link sausage—"This is pork, that OK?"

It was—Mabel was about the only Pines with an aversion to pork sausage, and that was really only because she didn't want to offend her pig friends—so Wendy sliced the links in half lengthwise and put a layer of them on top of the casserole. Then she poured in about half of the egg and milk mixture. Next a layer of shredded cheddar cheese. Then—"Pancakes now," she said.

She and Dipper shingled the casserole with pancakes, and she poured the rest of the eggs on top, followed by more cheese. She popped it into the oven. "Forty minutes, guys," she said. "This is what I call a lumberjack breakfast casserole."

They sat and drank coffee and chatted while the food cooked, sending a delicious smell drifting through the room. Ford asked Wendy about the CD case—the source of the Dreamsnake. "Got it from Robbie," she said. "Dipper remembers."

Stan nodded. "Yeah, yeah, right, that backwards-messaging thing, I remember it too."

Ford rubbed his chin and frowned. "Does Robbie dabble in black magic?"

Wendy almost did a spit-take with her coffee. " _Robbie_? No way, Dr. Pines! Fact, he said somebody else gave him the CD. He ripped the tune off another band, he told me. The CD he had in the case was home-made, a re-recording, 'cuz he'd put his own lyrics on to cover the backmasking."

"I wonder where the original CD, the one that came in the case, is," Ford said.

Stan grinned. "Ya want I should lean on the kid a little?"

"No!" Dipper said. "Uh, no. I'll find out about it. He's—well, he's grown up some, you know? I don't think he'd pull something like that now."

"Yeah," Wendy said. "You'd just scare him, Stan. Me and Dip can handle this. I'll get in touch with Robbie, and we'll see him sometime today or tomorrow."

They left it at that. The casserole was finished just before eight, and just in time for Fiddleford and Mayellen to come down and join in. Everybody loved it—"What do you call this?" Mayellen asked.

Wendy repeated, "Lumberjack breakfast casserole, Mrs. McGucket. Everything I like about breakfast in one dish."

"Please write down the recipe for me," Mrs. McGucket requested, and Wendy agreed at once.

"It's really good," Dipper said. "I mean, I'm not a tomato fan, but this is really tasty."

Fiddleford, who usually ate absent-mindedly and who had been known to ask suddenly, "Have I et breakfast yet?" nodded his agreement. "Puts me in mind o' what my mama called her shim-sham country-ham mix-up and tasty pie," he said.

Dipper started to understand where Fiddleford had picked up the gene that led him to christen his inventions things like "Robomajigger."

* * *

Wendy drove them up to Morris under a sky with fast-moving clouds, sometimes hiding the sun, sometimes letting the morning light slant through, sometimes pelting them with sharp but quickly-passing spasms of rain. They passed through the town—at one point, Dipper saw the hospital off to the right—and into the country, finally pulling into the driveway of a log house, a farmhouse—a working farmhouse, since two white-and-black Holstein cows in a pasture came over to the fence to stare at them as they parked, and a dense flock of free-range Rhode Island Red chickens came gossiping and murmuring up to the car and escorted the teens to the front porch.

"Aunt Sallie never kills them," she told Dipper. "They're strictly egg producers. Best eggs you've ever tasted, too!"

She didn't knock, but opened the front door and yelled, "Hey, anybody home?"

"Wendy!" Two boys, twins, but fraternal, one a head shorter than the other, came running to hug her. They kept talking at once about riding a mule, milking a cow, chopping wood for Auntie—Dipper couldn't follow a word of it.

"In here!" bellowed Manly Dan's voice.

They found him in the parlor, in a recliner with his leg in a cast, propped up with the heel resting on a pillow. He wore a blue work shirt, but red-plaid pajama bottoms—one leg split along the seam and down to the cuff and rolled and pinned to make room for the cast, already signed, Dipper noticed, by Bullets, Ford, and Stan.

Wendy kissed his cheek. "How's it goin', Dad?"

"I could walk if the doctors'd let me," Dan growled. Dipper noticed the crutches—huge, heavy ones, the kind an injured water buffalo might require—on the far side of the recliner.

"Bushwa!" A rangy, raw-boned, handsome woman with a bun of red hair—she was definitely a Corduroy!—bustled in, holding a vial of pills and a glass of water. "Danny, time for your medicine!"

"Aww—"

"Don't give me no lip, boy! Open up!"

Sheepishly, Dan opened his mouth, and she popped in a capsule about the size of an olive. "Drink this!"

He gulped down the water. "She picks on me," Dan complained.

"Rubbish and horse puckey!" The woman grinned at Dipper and offered her hand like a man. Dipper shook it. "Call me Aunt Sallie, everybody does. This Dipper, Wendy?"

"It is," Wendy said. "And this is Aunt Sallie, and don't you forget it, Dip."

"You bring my checkbook?" Dan growled at Wendy.

"You don't need that blame checkbook!" Aunt Sallie said.

"I ain't gonna be in your debt!"

"Bull-headed young cuss!"

"Old nag!"

Wendy's shoulders shook with suppressed laughter. "C'mon, dude," she said. "I'll show you around."

She took him through the kitchen and out onto the back porch. "They OK?" Dipper asked.

With a grin, Wendy assured him, "Yeah, just Corduroys bein' Corduroys, man. Aunt Sallie's five years older'n Dad and bosses him around. But they love each other."

"So—checkbook? What?"

"Aw, Dad's insurance took care of most everything with the hospital, but there's a two-thousand-dollar deductible he had to pay. Ford and Stan offered, but Aunt Sallie wouldn't hear of that, so she covered it. Now Dad's on fire to pay her back."

They went into the chicken house, which was very warm and smelled feathery. It was ankle-deep in fragrant cedar shavings. Along the wall were ranks of nest boxes, with odd little tilted ladders leading up to them. Dipper found it hard to visualize a chicken climbing up. "Let's see if they collected the eggs already," Wendy said.

They had, but she found one brown egg that must have been recently laid. "Check out the size," she said. "Nearly like a duck egg! Auntie sells these. She keeps dozens of chickens and they lay hundreds more than she can use. She sells milk, too."

"I guess she's a farmer?"

"Kinda. Keeps cows, chickens, raises pigs and sometimes sheep, grows potatoes, peas, beans, sweet corn. Got a fruit orchard, pears and apples. And she sells the produce, but really, she does all that more like a hobby. Her husband, Mr. Bellone, had investments that she lives off of. I don't know what-all, railroad, some mining interests, even some tech stock, I think. She's not hurtin' for money."

They visited the cows—Jezebel and Sheba—who were friendly and interested, and the long-eared mule, a patient-looking gray animal named Maxine. "No pigs," Wendy said. "Not right now. Don't tell Mabel, but they're all ham and bacon by this time of the year."

"I won't tell her," Dipper promised, "but she'd love to visit this place!"

"Any time, man."

Hesitantly, Dipper asked, "Um, Wendy—can your dad, you know, afford to pay Aunt Sallie back?"

She chuckled. "Yep. He's a big believer in rainy-day savings—I guess most lumberjacks kind of have to be, 'cuz you know, man, accidents happen. Yeah, his savings account's healthy enough to carry us through six months or so, maybe a whole year if we really stretch it, but Junior will get the business goin' again come January, so we're all right." She shrugged. "I know Dad worries about bein' laid up, but shoot, he always kicks back in December anyways—that's when we do Apocalypse training. We'll be fine."

They walked around, looking at the fallow fields and the pasture, and then back to the house. "You've got a nice place, Aunt Sallie," Dipper said as they came back in.

"Takes hard work to make it that way!" she said, but with a grin that reminded him of Wendy. "Thank you, young man."

"I mean to go back home with Wendy when she leaves," Dan grumbled from the recliner.

"Shut your yap-hole!" Sallie shot back. "You will stay with me and you will do your daily rehab until January fifth! Then if you behave yourself and can hobble around on your own, you can go back to Gravity Falls! And don't give me any more backtalk!" She reached for the remote and turned on the TV. "Here, watch a Brazilian soccer match. That always calms you down."

Sure enough, Dan soon immersed himself in the TV show, despite not understanding one word of Portuguese. The boys were somewhere outside, playing some game of their own—Dipper could hear their war-whoops as they circled the house. Aunt Sallie invited Dipper and Wendy into her kitchen, where they sat at the table and drank hot tea from Blue Willow china cups. "Pretty earrings," Sallie said to Wendy.

"Thank you," Wendy replied with a smile. "Early Christmas present from Dipper."

"Oh ho!" Sallie reached out her hand across the kitchen table. "Let me hold your hand for a minute, sonny boy."

Dipper blinked in surprise. "What?"

"Go ahead, man," Wendy said, grinning. "We got nothing to hide!"

Dipper put his hand in Aunt Sallie's firm grip. She leaned across the table—the red-and-white-checked vinyl tablecloth wrinkling a little under her elbow—and ordered, "Look me in the eye."

Feeling almost as creeped out as he had when Bill Cipher had said more or less the same thing, Dipper did as Sallie told him. Staring at her face, he couldn't help being strongly reminded of his freckle-faced Lumberjack Girl. Aunt Sallie's eyes were green, too, just like Wendy's.

She smiled, nodded and let go of his hand. "Good enough, good enough. Hang on to this one, Wendy. He's in love with you."

"You think?" Wendy asked, sounding surprised.

"Don't be a smart-ass, girl!" She reached out and stroked Wendy's hair. "You know that he is, well as I do. But you two are holding off. That's smart, and it's the right thing to do. He's a wee bit young for you. But he'll grow, and in time he's gonna tame you down some and you'll rile him up some and you'll meet right in the middle in a perfect fit. You watch out for each other, and every now and then when I've got a mind to, I'll say a little prayer for you both."

"Thanks," Dipper said, feeling a rush of relief.

"Yeah," Wendy agreed, reaching over and squeezing her aunt's hand. "We can always use prayers!"

* * *

"Second sight," Wendy explained later as she drove them south again, now in full sun, though a shelf of dark cloud was building again to the west. "She says she got it when she was a little girl. She was six years old and hanging upside-down by her knees from a tree limb and a funeral came by and she saw it between her legs as she was straightening up. That's a sure way to get second sight."

"I . . . never heard of that!" Dipper said.

"Yeah, old folk belief. Anyways, she can't read minds, but she's a dang good judge of character. It's a good sign that she trusts you, man. She'll be on our side if Dad ever cuts up rough about us. 'Course, she didn't give _me_ the once-over, or she'd have known that we both kinda want to—what is it she says—jump each other's bones sometimes!"

"Jump—I don't get it."

"Slang term from years ago, I think. Means do the deed, you know. The kinda action you dreamed about it last night!"

"Oh."

"Yeah, the big oh." She chuckled. "Come on, don't lame out! Hang tight, Dipper. We got this."

"Yeah," he said regretfully.

She sighed, and in a tone of equal wistful regret, she said, "Yeah . . . ." Then, almost impishly, she added, "Hey, you know there's a motel ahead, just off—"

"Don't do that to me!" Dipper pleaded.

She laughed a little. "OK. Yeah, it was mean of me. Sorry, man."

But after they'd passed the motel and left it safely behind, Dipper asked, "Uh, Wendy—if I'd said I had been interested in, you know, uh, in the motel, would you have—?"

"Maybe, dude," she said seriously. "Yeah, I think . . . maybe. I get tempted, too, you know."

Dipper sighed, not really knowing whether he felt relieved—or chagrined.

They decided to make a day of it, driving through colder weather and light blowing snow eastward over to The Dalles for shopping. It was a county seat, a big city—well, compared to Gravity Falls, because it had a population of about 15,000—and Wendy said it had a variety of shops as well as three malls.

Dipper was silent for several miles, pondering. Finally, he asked, "How are we gonna tackle Robbie?"

"Dunno. Play it by ear, I guess. Today, let's just shop, get the paint and fix up my dumb closet, and put everything out of our minds. I'll text Robbie and see if he and I can meet up somewhere tomorrow. Prob'ly can. If I know him, he'll realize it's like two days until Christmas and he doesn't have anything for Tambry, and he'll want my advice."

"Want me to come along?"

She considered. "Mm. Not tomorrow. We'll get together after I talk to him and I'll let you know what I find out."

"Be careful," Dipper warned.

Wendy smiled. "What? Man—this is _Robbie_ we're talking about!"

"I know," Dipper said. He sighed. "Believe me, I know."


	16. Chapter 16

**16: Disremembered**

* * *

 _ **(Tuesday, December 23, 2014)**_

"No," Wendy said to Robbie. "No, no, no, no, no." She took the see-through black lace negligee, with a thong-bikini bottom made of black lace and fishnet, out of his hands and hung it back on the rack of Thredz-4-Bedz.

"But Tambry would look _hot_ in it!" Robbie protested.

"Dude, this thing's like a present for _you,_ not her!" Wendy told him. "Come on, I know just what she'd most appreciate."

And probably Tambry would, but Robbie complained that the CallMe store's smart-phone kit—car and home charger, sturdy protective case, SD card and mini-USB for transferring photos and movies to a computer, cleaning kit, and so on—just wasn't _sexy._

"Show her you think about more than just her bod!" Wendy scolded.

He hunched in his hoodie, looking surly. "You're still mad 'cause I dumped you."

Wendy rolled her eyes. "Yeah, you're _so_ hard to get over. Look, get her this as one of her presents. Then I know what colors she likes. You can pick out a nice winter outfit for her— _not_ one made of gauze!"

Gravity Malls had opened its doors for Christmas shoppers at seven A.M. Robbie had promised Wendy he'd meet her at eight-thirty.

He had showed up at ten past nine, saw her sitting at a table in the food court, and sauntered over. "'Sup, babe?"

"Well, my patience is just about gone," Wendy said. "Where have you been?"

Robbie had just shrugged carelessly. "Lost track of time." He tossed his head. "Takes a while to get the hair right!"

"Let's find Tambry's presents," Wendy had said before she could say something worse.

And now here they were. Finally, Robbie gave in, got the phone kit, and they bought a few things over the next couple of hours. Then Wendy tackled the main job. By then the mall foot traffic had become a flood, so they sat in Robbie's van in the parking lot. "How are you and Tambry doing?" Wendy said.

"Great, great," Robbie said. "You know, wantin' to get school over with so we can do the whole wedding thing. Tambry wants to have, like, a goth wedding. Don't know where she got that idea."

Wendy did: Mabel. But she didn't mention that. "Heard you guys got sorta busted at her house," she said.

"Yeah, we were makin' out and kinda got too comfortable, and her mom comes in and starts screamin' at us."

"Robbie," Wendy said, "I know you've been sleeping with her."

"Not a lot!" Robbie said. "Practically not at all, hardly. And we're engaged. That's practically like being married." He rubbed his neck. "Anyways, I heard _you_ broke Dipper in, you know, and you and Dylan hooked up—"

"Stop. That's wrong. _No_ to both of those. Robbie, not one more word!"

"Well. I dunno. Sometimes I feel bad about you and me, you know. Uh, haven't mentioned this to Tambry, but if you're missin' me and maybe you're curious about a menagerie a trios—"

" _Ménage à trois_ ," Wendy corrected. "First, no. Real strong no! Second, if I tell Tambry about that, she'll break your neck. Listen, Robbie—you didn't pull that hypno-crap recording thing with Tambry, did you?"

"Huh? What hypno-crap?" Robbie asked, sounding so genuinely surprised that it gave Wendy pause.

"The back-masking CD deal you pulled on me," she said.

Robbie just stared at her. "Take it down a notch, reverse gears—babe, you're mixed up in the head! I mean, I've heard about that kind of subliminal message deal, but it's just _stories_ , you know? I wouldn't know how to do it myself."

"You . . . didn't give me a CD in a monster-face case?" Wendy asked.

"I'd remember that!" Robbie insisted.

And she thought he was telling the truth—for a change.

* * *

"He didn't remember any of it," Wendy said to Dipper at one o'clock that afternoon. They were in her house—the paint had dried, and they'd just applied a second coat to make sure the streaks got covered—and now they were washing up the paint brushes.

"Is he lying?" Dipper asked, scrubbing the latex paint out of the brushes with warm soapy water.

"No, I don't think so. I think he honestly just forgot—but I remember!"

"I do, too," Dipper said. "Might be an effect of the recording, I guess."

"Or—wait, yeah, I think I got it. It _could_ be that forget ray that the Society of the Blind Eye used. S'pose they ever went after Robbie?"

Dipper slapped his forehead, leaving a white-paint handprint. "Oh, my gosh! You're right! McGucket, Soos, and I found one of his memory tubes—Robbie was strapped in the chair where we saw Lazy Susan, and the Society members were making him forget—uh, a fight he was in!"

"Dude," Wendy said, "that could be it! The Society might've wiped his memory of what he did—only he remembered us calling it quits—wait a second, though! Robbie seems to think that us breakin' up was _his_ doing, not mine!"

"Mm," Dipper said. "That could be the effect of the memory eraser, too—or it could be just, you know, Robbie."

"You know what we gotta do," Wendy said as she squeezed the last rinse water from the two brushes they had cleaned.

"I'm afraid to think about it," Dipper admitted.

"We gotta go to the secret rooms in the History Museum and find Robbie's memories!"

"Yay," Dipper said, but weakly.

"One thing I have to do first, though," Wendy said in a husky voice, leaning close.

"Uh—really?"

"Yeah. I gotta wash your face, dude! Man, you even got some paint in your hair!"

* * *

With most of the townspeople out elsewhere, shopping, the Museum was quiet. They paid their token admission and got in, wandered around a bit, and then when they were sure nobody was observing them, they went to the eye room (as Dipper thought of it) and Dipper pressed the slashed-eye bas-relief sculpture. The fireplace with its fake fire slid to the side, and the two of them hurried down the stairs as it rumbled back into place again.

"Ford didn't build this place, did he?" Wendy asked.

"Think it was here long before he got to town," Dipper told her.

"Yeah, but the architecture reminds me of his lab rooms in the Shack, and the bunker."

Dipper found a light switch that worked. "Come on. The memory container room is this way. Wait. No, that way!"

Even with a light switched on, the big stone-walled chamber was dim. They sorted the hundreds of memory tubes—containers of memories the Society had collected from the citizens of Gravity Falls over many years—and Dipper began to organize them in alphabetical stacks.

"Is that necessary?" Wendy asked, smiling.

"Well—we'll probably want to come back again later," Dipper said. "These should really be taken care of."

"Cool!" Wendy said. "I'll bring popcorn and sodas. It'll be like movie night!"

The tubes seemed to be hit-or-miss in representing the town's citizens. The names of some people had been inscribed on dozens of the memory containers. Deputy Durland alone had fifty-one, a whole stack by itself. On the other hand, neither Ford nor Stan was represented by even a single tube. No Corduroys, either. None for Dipper or Mabel. Only one for Soos—and that one turned out to be his stopping his truck downtown, leaning out the window, and yelling _ **,**_ "Hey, dawgs, Summerween's two months off!"

What he had stopped for was a group of six figures hurrying across the midnight street, figures in hooded robes with the red X-ed out eye of the Society of the Blind Eye printed on them. His having seen them seemed to be the only Soos memory they had taken.

Robbie Valentino's parents had a couple each—Dipper and Wendy didn't look at them—but Robbie had seven tubes. "Brace yourself, dude," Wendy said. "This might be kinda painful."

The earliest one seemed to have come from elementary school. The Society had the kid in the hot seat, and the leader, Blind Ivan, asked, "What have you seen?"

"Uh, this girl in my class was hitting on me?" Robbie said. "And I followed her home to get even? And this giant with an axe in his head tried to beat me up, but I kicked his butt!"

When the actual memory played, Wendy gasped. "The ghost of Archibald Corduroy must have scared Robbie off when he was stalking me! I remember now. Robbie pulled my hair. I wore pigtails then. Fifth grade, I think it was a birthday party or some deal, and I punched him out! Then later he came along behind me when I was walkin' home, and he was callin' me mean names, until somewhere along the way, he just dropped out of sight. I guess that was when Archibald scared him."

"That's not the way he told it, though," Dipper said.

Wendy shrugged. "Well, dude, Robbie was kinda close to the truth, anyway. if I wasn't hitting _on_ him, I was hitting _him_!"

Another memory tube: Robbie, at the age of maybe thirteen, using a OuiJa board, asking "How can I make a girl, like, be my slave?"

Without his fingers touching the planchette, the heart-shaped indicator moved on its own around the board and slowly spelled out _Get lost, creep!_ And Robbie freaked out.

"Here we go!" Wendy said when they loaded the next one.

Robbie, as he was at sixteen, fingerless gloves, hoodie, and all, was in a dark corner of a dark room. Discordant heavy-metal music was playing, making his voice hard to hear: "So . . . this is legit?"

A shadowy figure with a raspy voice said, "Real deal, dude. I bought it off of Spikeface in Frisco."

Dipper snorted and muttered, "Frisco? Nobody calls it that!"

On the screen, Robbie was handing over money—at least a couple hundred dollars, Dipper thought, though it was hard to tell. "So how does it work?"

"It's hypnotic," the raspy-voiced dude said. "Be sure you give it to her in the case, right? The first tune's got the hypnotic track on it. That'll get her all suggestible and prepared. Then make sure she has the case somewhere close by in her room, wherever she sleeps. There's a piece of paper inside the case with some words you have to say after she's sleeping. That'll make her your slave for life."

"The jerk!" Wendy growled. Dipper couldn't tell if she meant the seller or the sixteen-year-old Robbie. Both were brothers in the fraternity of jerkhood, as far as he was concerned.

"So—what if she don't listen to the whole song?" Robbie asked.

"I don't know if it would work or not. Hey, got an idea. Re-record the song on a CD of your own," the stranger suggested. "Lay in some lyrics about her. Like, title the song after her, man. Girls can't resist listening to that kind of music. The back-masking will still hypnotize her, 'cause it's subconscious, right? And it don't have to be the original recording to work. But make sure your CD goes in this case! That's crucial."

"This better work," Robbie said.

"It's guaranteed."

Abruptly, the memory ended.

"Did you recognize the guy who sold that thing to Robbie?" Dipper asked.

Wendy shook her head and, her voice taut with fury, she replied, "If I knew, I'd track him down and kick his butt! That place, though, it's the Night Dump, over in Portland. Local indie bands play there, Robbie took me once or twice. Man, you warned me the night Robbie gave me that thing, but I thought it was just Robbie bein' himself, you know? I didn't understand the CD was cursed!"

"I . . . think it's more like the _case_ was cursed," Dipper said. "That's where the T'K, uh, T'Kla—I'm sorry, I still can't pronounce it, call it the Dreamsnake manifested."

"Well," Wendy said, "I s'pose that's why Robbie didn't give me a straight answer. He _couldn't_ , 'cause they erased this memory."

They still had three more of Robbie's memories to look through. Wendy looked a little flustered. "Um, dude, do me a favor? I think these ought to be checked, but, you know, Robbie and I had a little history goin' on that summer. Let me go through them alone, just in case memories of me show up?"

"Sure," Dipper said. He got up from the floor—they had taken the viewer down and were watching the memories as if they really were viewing some awful horror film on late-night TV, like _Where's My Werewolf At?_ or _Zombie Cheerleaders go to College._ Dipper went outside the room and paced a little. Wendy came out after ten minutes. "So?" Dipper asked.

Wendy shrugged. "Nothin' you couldn't have seen. But, man, you should've told me about that video-game guy who somehow came to life and wanted to kill Robbie. Looks to me like you saved Robbie's life by lettin' the dude beat up on you! Was that the time my family and me got back from a campin' trip and your and Robbie's faces were all jacked up?"

Dipper sighed. "Yeah. I kind of broke Robbie's phone when he was calling you to rag on me. Didn't mean to. But he was all mad and threatened to beat me up and told me to meet him in Circle Park. I found out a way to bring Rumble McSkirmish to life and asked him to help me scare Robbie off—but he thought that I meant he had to throw down on Robbie. I didn't want him to do that, but you can't explain anything to a guy who's programmed to be a video-game character. I tried to call Rumble off, but in the end he had to fight somebody so the game would end. I let him punch me out. I'm sorry."

"You don't have to be sorry," Wendy said. "It was a mistake. Yeah, I hate it when guys just fight 'cuz they're O.D.'d on testosterone, but you kinda saved Robbie's life, I think. I still don't approve of the whole fighting thing, but you did it to make up for your mistake, and judging from what I saw, you showed guts, man."

"Anything else to help us?" Dipper asked.

"Nah. That one tube was it. Wish we knew who sold him that thing! But he said he got it in San Francisco from somebody named Spikeface."

"So, I guess we need to find out who he was."

"Not a lot to go on."

* * *

But trust the World Wide Web. It knows a lot about everybody. Even you. That thing you did? Yeah, though you'd have sworn nobody ever found out, it's on there somewhere. You might want to check up on that. Just a friendly heads-up.

Dipper found the information he was looking for on a library computer:

* * *

 **SPIKEFACE SCREAMER:** Lead guitarist for the death metal band SCREAM ONCE AND DIE, 1991-1994. Screamer (real name Lawrence B. Blurchard, b. 1970, Petaluma, CA) performed in several Bay Area punk bands in the late eighties, including JUNKYARD, YO-MOMMA TRASH, and SMILEY FACE before organizing the group. SCREAM ONCE AND DIE also featured Snort Fangs on drums, Trish Razor on rhythm guitar, and Corpse Melon on keyboard (real names Samuel Kreplin, Susan Flowers, and Carl Debbinzer). They performed in venues in San Francisco and the Bay Area, released one album, WE HATE YOU, GO DIE, and made a few TV appearances before they broke up over artistic differences. They never had a number 1 hit, but three of their songs, "Everybody Bleeds," "Smell This," and "Shut Up, Slut" sold well enough to make it to the lower rungs of the Top 100 Alternate and Disgusting Songs in 1992 and 1993. Blurchard went on to produce recordings for Garage Barrage Music (Monterey) and, together with Flowers, to provide original music and score roughly twenty low-budget films shot in and around San Francisco between 1995 and 2007. The other two members of SCREAM ONCE AND DIE seem to have dropped out of the music scene.

* * *

Dipper printed the paragraph out. "We'll see what Grunkle Ford thinks about this," he told Wendy.

She looked troubled. "Yeah. I wonder, though, if we ought to push it? The CD's disappeared, the jacket's been, like annihilated, and—maybe if I can sleep in my room again we ought to drop it."

"Let's see what he thinks," Dipper told her. "I just want you to be safe."

"Is the old-lady librarian looking?"

Dipper glanced around. "No, she's not at the desk."

"Then kiss me," Wendy said.

It was the best suggestion of the day.


	17. Chapter 17

**Chapter 17: 'Twas the Day Before Christmas**

* * *

 _(Wednesday, December 24, 2014)_

The undependable Oregon weather had swung around again, and Wednesday dawned warmer—46 degrees—and perfectly fair, with not a cloud in sight and a predicted high of 60. Practically balmy, in fact.

Once again Wendy had slept over in Mabel's room, and once again she and Dipper got up early and did their run. In the not-quite-so-frigid air, they loped an easy three miles and came back to a sensible breakfast—hard-boiled eggs, whole-grain toast (with peanut butter instead of margarine—more protein), fruit, and coffee. Ford and Stan planned to head over to the Portland airport at mid-morning, because the Pines family was flying up for Christmas and then the double wedding of Stanford and Stanley Pines.

"Want to go back to my place with me?" Wendy asked Dipper. "They won't get back from Portland until five o'clock or so, and you can help me get my closet put back together. I'll sleep at our house tonight."

"Aw," Dipper said. "Why don't you stay here and celebrate Christmas with us?"

"Well, I can drive over, you know," she said. But he looked sad—he was rocking the big-eyed puppy look—and she said, "OK, OK, don't guilt me, man! Well, I hate to impose on Dr. and Mrs. McGucket to ask for another room, but how's this? I'll sleep in your room at the Shack. Soos and Melody won't mind, and that puts me just ten minutes away, so I can come over and spend the whole morning with you and Mabes. 'Cept I do want to drive up to Morris in the afternoon, just to have an hour with Dad and Aunt Sallie."

"Sounds good," Dipper said, all smiles.

With that decided, they told the Stans where they were going, and then Wendy went up to Mabel's room to pack up her dirty clothes—despite Fiddleford's offer, she said she preferred doing her own laundry, though the collecting robot did creep in and start to gather the sheets and covers before she left the room. The silent, mobile metal hamper also creeped her out, just a little.

"OK, dude," she said, coming into Dipper's room. "You packed?"

"Huh?" he asked. "Packed? Uh, I've just got your trapper's hat and my coat—"

"No, that's no good for what I got in mind. Pack something," Wendy said with a smile, "that you could wear, oh, like in swimming!"

With all the excitement of Wendy's paranormal attacker and Dan's injury, he had forgotten about the expedition to the hot spring that Wendy had suggested. "O-OK," he stammered. They got out of the room before the robot came in to claim Dipper's sheets.

* * *

Toward noon the temperature had shot up to—well, maybe not _shot_ , it had risen to fifty-five, but that was higher than forty-six and was almost on the low side of comfortable. At the Corduroy house Dipper and Wendy had hung all of Wendy's clothes back in her closet. She giggled a little at how Dipper sorted them on the rack, in a very sensible order, something she never did. The repainted closet shelf and corner showed no stain from the Dreamsnake and smelled normally piny. Once the clothes were in, Wendy sorted and arranged her shoes and boots, and finally, she had put a load of flannel and jeans into the washing machine. They wound up with a light lunch.

At a few minutes to twelve, they drove out to the river bank facing the old ghost town of Plenty—the wreckage of the fallen covered bridge had settled a little, Dipper noticed—and they hiked four miles through hilly woods to the grassy hillside near Ghost Falls, where Wendy loved to camp. The going was much easier now that the underbrush was dry and brittle with the changing season, and they made very good time.

The waterfall with its illusory ghost figure showing through its water had grown much more robust with the fall rains and kept up a loud roar and sent up spray that sported its gorgeous permanent rainbow. The teens walked downhill, then past the beaver pond, across a broad, shallow creek, around the foot of the cliffs, and at last came to the overhang scooped out of the rock face, like a gigantic teacup on edge, in which the round hot spring bubbled.

When Dipper had first seen it, back in summer, the pool had looked pleasant. Now it looked even more so, with trailers of steam rising from it promising soothing warmth.

Wendy had brought her axe, and they wasted no time in chopping enough dead-fall wood to make a small, discreet campfire. "OK," Wendy said when it was crackling. She stood up and crossed her arms with her back toward Dipper. "You change first. I won't peek, I promise." She gazed out at the woods, their branches bare now, when winter was upon them. A murder of curious crows came and perched in the tallest twigs, cawing loudly as they studied the human intruders.

Gulping, Dipper shrugged out of his coat—the hike had warmed him, and anyway the weather hadn't been cold enough for him to zip it—and then, hesitantly, he took off his shoes and unzipped his jeans . . . .

* * *

 **From the Journals of Dipper Pines (Decrypted from his Vigenere Cipher #3):** _I was wearing them under my jeans, so as soon as I got everything else off, without even folding my things, I climbed into the water—it was so relaxing, with the bubbles coming up and tickling me all over and the warm currents just inviting me to slip down so only my head was above the water—and I kept my face turned away as Wendy got into her bathing suit._

 _She had brought her swimsuit in a bag, along with our towels. So, I sort of knew she had to strip completely. She was humming quietly to herself, and I wanted to look at her, but, hard though it was, I leaned against the rock and stared at the back of the little cavern. The crows sounded appreciative, though!_

 _I did not look around. I was tempted, but I did not._

 _We were lucky—at an hour past noon, the sun was slanting into the little cavern, the light breeze was blowing away from the opening, drifting the smoke of our fire away, and between the campfire and the hot spring, it was cozy and warm in the hollow._

" _Here I come, dude!" Wendy said._

 _And she sat on the edge of the spring, dangled her long legs down in the pool right next to me, and said, "Mmm, just right!" And then she slipped down into the water beside me._

 _But not before I noticed—_

" _You got a bikini!" I said._

 _She gave me a mischievous smile. "Mm-hmm. 'Cause I got to thinkin', you already saw that dumb photo, so, well, you know about all there is to know, right? Might as well go for it. First one I ever wore, man. Do you like it?"_

" _Yeah, I do!" It was a festive Christmassy red. Not that a girl could often wear a bikini in the winter in Gravity Falls, but if she could, one like Wendy's was just right for the Christmas season!_

" _OK, dude," she said, carefully spreading her long hair out on the rock behind her and sinking down so only her shoulders, neck, and head were above the surface, "I showed you mine. Your turn. Get out of the water for a minute and let me see what you got."_

" _Um—maybe not," I said._

" _Come on!" she said, laughing. "Show me! Show me! Show me!"_

 _I felt scared and tense. "OK. But don't laugh."_

" _Won't promise anything!"_

 _I put my hands on the rock lip of the spring and pushed hard and scrambled out of the water. I stood dripping up on the edge. The contrast between the warm water and the cool air gave me sudden goosebumps._

 _Wendy gazed up at me with a big smile. She caught the left side of her lower lip between her teeth, murmured, "Mmm!", and she made a little circle with her right forefinger. "C' mon, man," she teased._

 _I turned around, slowly, so she could see my, well, you know, my back. And all. "I like it," she said. "Dipper, you surprise me! That is a very tight and very small Speedo!"_

 _I hopped back in the water, making her giggle and flinch away from the splash. I said, "You TOLD me to get one."_

" _Yep," she agreed. "My bikini is still kinda, you know, something I'm not quite used to. How's your Speedo feel?"_

 _I squirmed a little. "Like I'm wearing a jockstrap that's too small," I admitted._

 _Wendy put her arm over my shoulder. "That's appropriate for Christmas," she said. "Lemme see. . . ."_

 _Then she didn't say, but thought it to me:_

* * *

All the Wendys in Falls-ville liked swimsuits a lot—

But the Dipper, who lived down south of Falls-ville did not!

The Dip hated swimsuits, whatever the season!

Now, don't ask me why, 'cause I don't know the reason—

It might be his girlfriend wasn't built just quite right,

Or maybe he thought his buns were too small and too tight—

But you know, I think the best reason of all

Was that Dipper's Speedo was two sizes too small!"

* * *

 _I had to laugh. "You're a mean one, Wendy_ _C.!"_

She joined me in laughing. " _Nah. OK, man, this is our time, just set aside for you and me. And just like when we shared a bed, I want us to honor our pledge, right? We can hug and snuggle and kiss and stuff, but I don't want to be mean to you. Let's just help each other relax, but agree to stay inside the ballpark, OK?"_

 _I kissed her. "Yeah."_

" _So you liked my poem?" she teased me._

" _Liked it a lot. It's not true, though," I told her, putting my arm around her. "You are built just EXACTLY right, from your head to your toes, and I'm including your pretty freckles, even if you complain about them! In fact, you're built so right that I don't even care if I never get to be tall as you! Wendy, I was just a kid when it happened, but I knew from the very second you first handed me the golf-cart keys and gave me your smile that I always wanted to be close to you!"_

 _She hugged me really, really tight, our bodies pressing together in the steamy, bubbly water. She nibbled on my earlobe without really biting down. Then she licked my neck. "Mmm, salty! You mean this close?" she whispered in my ear._

 _Yeah. Oh, yeah. Just like this. Yes, Wendy, this close._


	18. Chapter 18

**Chapter 18: Let There Be Lights**

* * *

 _(Wednesday, December 24, 2014)_

Mabel Pines came bounding down the escalator, weaving in and out among startled airline passengers, and then dashed up to her Grunkles. "We're here! We're here!" she announced, rather unnecessarily, giving them both tight hugs.

"Whoa, Nelly!" Stan said, laughing, as he swung her once around and set her back on her feet. "Hey, hey, you've grown some just since Thanksgiving! Hiya, Pumpkin!"

"Mom and Dad are right behind me!" she said.

Which was not quite true, because they were fairly far behind her, at the very top of the escalator, Dad struggling with not one, but two rolling carry-on bags, one of them hot pink and plastered over with stickers.

"Was it a good flight?" Ford asked, smiling.

"Yeah!" Mabel said. "A two bagger!"

"I—beg your pardon?"

"She used two airsick bags, Poindexter," Stan said as Mabel's and Dipper's parents approached. "Hi, you two!"

He hugged Mabel's mom and shook hands with her dad, as did Ford—though his hug was a little shyer than his outgoing twin's. Mrs. Pines, smiling, said, "I can't get over how _well_ you both look!"

Mabel confidently said, "It's having the love of a good woman! That makes any guy feel younger! I saw that on TV. Where's Dipper?"

"There wouldn't be room for him in the car, with you guys and your luggage," Stan said. "Besides, he's helping Wendy redecorate her room."

"Ho-ho!" Mabel said. "Go, Dipper!"

"Mabel!" her mom said sharply.

"How is Mr. Corduroy?" Mr. Pines asked.

"Doin' well," Stan said. "Outa the hospital, but he's staying up in Morris with his widowed sister for a couple weeks while he gets some intensive rehab. Doctor says he'll be fine in five-six months. You guys ready? We're in short-term parking."

"No!" Mabel said. "We had to pick up some luggage!"

"Baggage claim is this way, then," Ford said.

They found the right carousel and collected a surprising amount: Four big boxes, three suitcases, two smaller packages, and a partridge in a pear tree. Well, not that last one. "My goodness," Ford said.

"Presents!" Mabel said. "Well, and sweaters, but mostly presents! And Mom and Dad's clothes for the wedding. And my bridesmaid's dress! Woohoo!"

Ford found a couple of luggage trolleys, they trundled everything out, and with some difficulty they squeezed it all into the Lincoln—though with Ford's two big metal cases of equipment in the trunk, they had to put some of the smaller things in the back seat. Mabel squeezed in the front, between her Grunkles.

"I've got some news for Dip," she said. "He called me, and I did some research! Will you drive me to Wendy's house?"

"Not necessary," Stan said. "Wendy and Dip are gonna be at the McGuckets' by the time we get back."

"Oh! Oh!" Mabel half-turned in the seat. "I'm gonna ask them, Dad!"

"Mabel—"

"Grunkle Stan, Grunkle Ford, I packed the menorah! Is it OK to have the last night of Hanukkah at Dr. McGucket's house?"

"I think—" Ford began.

"Sure, sweetie!" Stan said over his brother's voice. "He and his missus won't mind. Hey, ya know, it's been, like, what, fifty years since I celebrated Hanukkah? Yeah, we'll do it!"

"As long as we're not bothering them," Mom said from the back seat.

"You kiddin'?" Stan asked. "I'll lay you odds that Fiddleford and Mayellen will join in. Hey, hope ya brought enough gelt to go around!"

"I'll put off telling Dip about Spikeface until after," Mabel said happily. "That'll be my Hanukkah present to him!"

"Spikeface?" Ford asked.

"That name kinda rings a bell," Stan said. "Wasn't he a musician a hundred years ago?"

"Death Metal," Mabel said. "Dipper wanted to find out everything he could about him."

"That kinda music never was my thing," Stan said. "And Ford was out of, uh, the country back then, so whatever you found out will be news to us. But, yeah, save it for later." He gave Mabel a wink that her parents couldn't see and under the pretense of scratching his nose, he pressed a finger against his lips.

"Gotcha," Mabel said. "Look! _Snow_!"

A few inches covered the ground, though the highways were clear. "Yeah," Stan said, "we got a little ourselves earlier, right after Thanksgiving. Just rain since then, but we might have a white Christmas or a white wedding day. There's just a chance, the weatherman says."

For the rest of the trip, they talked about weather, and how cold it was in Oregon (45 degrees in Portland, as opposed to 63 when they had left Piedmont), and about how pretty the woods were with a frosting of snow, and this and that.

From time to time, Stan would mutter under his breath, "Spikeface, Spikeface . . . why is that name so dang familiar?"

* * *

Wendy and Dipper toweled off, and then he gallantly said, "You can get dressed first."

"Close your eyes and hold up the towel between us," Wendy told him. "Keep the breeze off me."

With one of the two red towels wrapped around him like a toga, he spread and held up the second one, his eyes closed as requested, though the thought of her getting out of her wet bathing suit within arm's reach of him made his heart beat faster. When she was in her jeans and flannel shirt and jacket again, she said, "That's better! Sure feels cold when you get out! OK, dude, your turn. I'm gonna sit on this rock here with my back toward you and put on my socks and boots. I won't look."

He trusted her, but he dressed with his back to her, too. Then they doused their campfire with water from the spring, scattered the wet ashes, and hiked back to her car, holding hands. "Wonderful day, Dipper," Wendy said. "Mm, I feel all relaxed and happy now. You?"

"Yeah, I loved it," Dipper told her.

In a voice that might have been teasing or might have been playful, she added, "You know, I'm thinking, if we get married in Gravity Falls, I want to come out here . . . for the honeymoon. Or at least to kick it off right!" she said.

With his heart climbing up into his throat, it was hard for Dipper to say—with deep yearning—"That would be sweet!"

They got in her Dodge Dart and drove back to her place—she transferred the wash to the dryer and tossed her bathing suit and the two red towels into the washing machine. "Want me to do your Speedo?" she asked.

"Um, maybe not," he said, squirming a little. "If I left it here and somebody found it—"

"Gotcha," she said with a grin. "OK, but be sure you let it dry before you put it away. Otherwise, it could mildew. I think maybe you ought to replace it anyhow. Maybe, mm, one size larger?"

"Maybe," he said _,_ turning pink.

She nudged him. _"Hey, you_ don't have it on now! It's in the plastic bag in the car! Time for getting flustered is over, man!"

Wendy put in a call to her dad, assured him that everything in the house was OK, and she and Dipper relaxed and watched a bad old movie on the Afternoon Bargain Matinee for a couple of hours. Then she took out her dry laundry, Dipper helped her fold things and hang others up—she still smiled and shook her head at the way he hung all her jeans together, sorted by color, and all her flannel shirts, red, green, and blue (only one of the latter, though), and so on. "Organized, man," she said.

Grinning shyly, he told her about the dance back when he was twelve and how he had wanted to ask her out on the floor but had been too scared to try. "I actually had this passing fantasy," he admitted, "that we were dancing, and you were so impressed at how organized I'd been you wanted me to show you my to-do list!"

"Yeah," she said with a chuckle. "That always sweeps a girl off her feet!" She kissed him. "But this," she whispered, "is a better way."

Before they got seriously started again, they drove over to the Shack, where Wendy stowed her overnight bag—"Dude," Soos said, "you know you're always welcome! Mi casa is your casa, dawg!"

Then she took Dipper over to the McGucket house. They hadn't been there five minutes before Ford's dark-blue Lincoln drove in, and they went out to help unload things.

"Mabel," Dipper said after his sister had released him from a hello hug, and he had glimpsed the full trunk, "what the heck? Did you pack up the whole house?"

"Pretty much!" she agreed, hugging Wendy. "The movers have already taken all our boxed-up stuff to the new house! Your bedroom _is_ the one in the middle, right?"

"No!" Dipper said. "Left at the top of the stairs! The middle one's the small one, for my music stuff and your crafts—"

"Hah! Gullible!" Mabel crowed. "Gotcha, Brobro. The correct room's marked on the boxes, remember?"

While the adults visited, the twins and Wendy moved Mabel's stuff up to her bedroom on the second floor. Their parents would share the fifth of the six guest rooms on the wing, down at the end of the hall, with windows looking out over the back yard-it was one of the two larger rooms and had a really nice view.

"OK," Mabel said, sitting on her bed—which one of Fiddleford's bots had made up, though it was the one that always put the mint under the pillow instead of on top of it. "Dip, mission accomplished, sort of. You asked me to find about that guy, Spikeface Screamer?"

"Yeah," Dipper said. "What did you turn up?"

"Just wait!" Mabel opened her suitcase and arranged her clothes by tossing them randomly on the bed and chair. "Here you go! Not a present, Dip! Evidence!" Her eyes narrowed. "Evidence!"

She handed him a 9x12 manila envelope. He opened it and found a folded glossy poster inside. Wendy leaned over as he spread it out on the bed. It was an old one, an advertisement for a CD—the one-and-only album ever released by the band Scream Once and Die, the appropriately-titled _We Hate You, Go Die._

The poster was noticeably worn—the creases showed white on the somewhat faded gloomy purple-blue-black swirls of the background, and one bisected the image of the CD case, which was a bruise-purple, with the band name in white and the title of the CD in letters that were supposed to look as though they had been painted in fresh drippy blood but failed to pull that off. A bald man glowered from the background, looking like a baggy-eyed and evil Humpty Dumpty.

Below that was an image of the band, without instruments, but dressed in the depth of punk fashion: The skinny guy on the left, slightly behind the front two, was obviously the drummer because he was holding up a drumstick as though it were a lethal weapon. His face had more metal in it than a typical auto-repair shop, pins, skewers, rings, and other accessories. He had a purple Mohawk, and he was wearing what looked like a leopard-skin coat over a bare, hairy chest.

The girl in the front had to be Trish Razor. Her hair looked as if a mattress had exploded—orange streamers standing out in every direction. She'd used black lipstick, but it looked as if her mascara was from a different tube, this one red. She was sneering and wore a chrome-studded dog collar, complete with chain leash, an open gold lamé jacket that might have been designed for a seven-year old and under that and very visible, a black bra. The guy next to her was holding her leash and had three metal spikes emerging from his chin, and his black hair was in stiff spikes, too. He was in a red, torn, ratty T-shirt and over that a purple feather boa around his shoulders. Spikeface, obviously.

And behind and on the right stood a—very ordinary-looking guy, a little bit chunky, wearing a fedora and a rumpled white dress shirt and standing next to a keyboard. The only concession to punkery he'd made was to wear pale green make-up.

"This is it?" Dipper asked.

"Well, it was short notice," Mabel said. "Hey, at least I found this in the memorabilia shop! It was cheap, though. The guy in the shop didn't know anything about the band or Spikeface, but I made some calls. One radio station put me in touch with a retired DJ who knew them back when, and he told me—sorry, Dip—that Spikeface died in 2010 or 2011. He thinks the girl is still around, though, but he doesn't know how to find her."

"Well," Dipper said, "we can try, I guess." He looked at the poster again. "Wonder who the guy is on the cover of the album case? It's not one of the band. It's an old photo, I think—looks like maybe from the fifties or earlier. He sort of looks familiar."

"Kinda like Blind Ivan," Wendy said.

But Mabel shook her head. "Nah, that's just 'cause they're both bald. This guy's a lot heavier and he's got even creepier eyes than old Toot-Toot."

"Yeah, I just can't place him," Dipper said.

Wendy stretched. "Good work findin' the poster, though, Mabes. Maybe we can follow through with it."

"Yeah, but its Christmas Eve," Dipper said. "And then we have the rehearsal and the weddings and all. So I don't think we can do much with this until maybe next week."

"Then just forget it for the time being," Mabel said. "Live in the present! Oh, Wendy, you have to do the menorah with us! And then we'll have a big meal! Latkes will be featured!"

"I've never been to a, what, Hanukkah service? Whatever," Wendy said. "Won't it be awkward to have an outsider?"

"Not at all!" Mabel said. "We've had guests before! And Hanukkah isn't like one of the high holidays—it's a Festival of Lights! It's just a time for the family and friends to feel close and then pig out! Except Dad probably wouldn't want me to say pig. But you get the idea! Speaking of pigs, before it gets dark, would you drive me over to the Shack for just a little bit so I can say hi to Waddles and Widdles?"

Wendy grinned. "Let's go!"

* * *

Fiddleford and Mayellen had no objection at all to the Pines family's celebration of the last night of Hanukkah. As night drew on, they made room on a parlor sideboard near a front window for the menorah, a beautiful antique silver candelabrum, the family gathered—along with the McGuckets, Sheila Remley, Lorena Jones, and Wendy—and Dad said, "Well, the oldest guy in our family traditionally takes the lead. Uncle Stanford?"

Ford looked startled. "Well, I—to tell the truth, it's been so long that I'm afraid I—well—"

Stan rolled his eyes. "I'll do it, Ford. OK, everybody, gather around. You know, I recognize this menorah—you got it from your dad, didn't you? I suppose Shermy inherited it from Ma and Pa. OK, listen up, you who don't know about this stuff. There's a couple of blessings I'll say, and when I finish each one, everybody says 'amen.' What they are, they give thanks for the blessings the family's received in the last year and for the blessings of times of old—the gift of the lights and what they mean to us."

He held up one candle, a somewhat larger one than the others. "OK, this is called the shamash. It's kinda the boss candle and goes in the middle. I'm gonna put the other ones in." He added eight candles, four on the right, four on the left, going right to left, and then with a small lighter, he lit the shamash. "Now the blessings." He cleared his throat and then said, " _Baruch atah, Adonai Eloheinu, Melech haolam, asher kid'shanu b'mitzvotav v'tsivanu l'hadlik ner shel Hanukkah._ "

Mr. Pines said, "Amen," and the others followed close, almost in unison.

As he lit the remaining candles, Stan intoned, " _Baruch atah, Adonai Eloheinu, Melech haolam, shehecheyanu v'kiy'manu v'higianu laz'man hazeh._ " This time, everyone was ready and the "Amen" chorus was more uniform.

"There we go," Stan said, grinning. "After I had a little memory problem a couple years ago, I'm surprised at how well I could remember those! Now, this is key: Nobody blows out the candles! It ain't a birthday party. Happy Hanukkah, everybody. Bring out the dreidels and then let's eat!"

At dinner—which did feature potato latkes as well as a brisket—Dipper quietly asked Wendy, "Was that too weird?"

"You kidding, man?" she asked with a big grin. "It's not weird at all. It's very moving. And I think it's so cool that Stan remembered the blessings after all that time."

Dipper squeezed her hand under cover of the table top. His dad wasn't really working hard at his traditions, but he looked marvelously happy. And Dipper realized it was because for the first time in forever—all the Pines family had gathered to be together at this special time of year.

And that made Hanukkah and Christmas both times of light and joy.


	19. Chapter 19

**19: Christmas Presence**

 _ **(Thursday, December 25, 2014)**_

* * *

Of all the 365 days, five hours, forty-eight minutes, and forty-six seconds in the year (no, really, look it up), the one day when Mabel always woke up super early was Christmas. Even after the twins reluctantly said farewell to Santa the year before, because, after all, the old fellow had younger children to visit, her eyes still popped open somewhere between 3:42 and 4:07, as they did on that morning.

At first, she lay awake but confused—her bed at home wasn't queen-sized, and the window was in the wrong place entirely—but then she remembered—Gravity Falls! She was in the McGucket mansion, not at home in Piedmont.

And immediately she felt a little ache of regret. When she returned home from Gravity Falls to Piedmont in January, her home wouldn't be, well, her home. Not her old house, anyway. She and the rest of her family would go back to the new house on the cul-de-sac, and she'd be sleeping in her new bedroom with one window giving her a view of Piedmont Park—well, you could see the tops of some of the trees, anyway—and the other looking out over the back yard with its oval, sub-Olympic-sized swimming pool.

Their house was the only one on the whole street with its own pool, small though it might be. Maybe in the spring she could throw pool parties for some of her high-school friends. Not too many at a time, though—more than six probably wouldn't fit! Another advantage was that she'd have a craft room all her own, if you didn't count sharing it with Dipper and his guitar and Sousaphone, which she didn't.

"Oh, man," she groaned in the dark. "It's so _early_!" The family had decided they'd open one present each—just one each!—when they first got up. When they were _all_ up, her mom had insisted, looking straight at Mabel. Then Wendy would come over, and maybe Teek—she'd phoned him, and he was anxious to see her, but he said, "We always have Christmas brunch, so it'll be around eleven, I guess. I'll be there earlier if I can slip away!"

Bored in the silent darkness, Mabel got out of bed, turned on the bedside reading lamp, and then went through the connecting bathroom and opened the door into Dipper's room. "Brobro?"

Dipper's breathing was steady and regular. "Dipper?"

He didn't respond.

Mabel crept up beside the head of his bed. In the faint illumination spilling through the bathroom, she could see he lay on his right side, hugging a pillow, his cheek nestled against it. "Aw. So cute." She leaned in very close. "MERRY CHRISTMAS, BROSEPH!"

"Yah!" Dipper scrambled away, and even though his bed was queen-sized, too, he fell off the far side with a thud. Mabel hopped up onto the bed. "Christmas morning, Dip!"

He rose like the Creature from the Black Lagoon standing up in an oozy pool choked with mats of hydrilla vines. "Mabel!"

"Wanted to be the first to wish you season's greetings," she said, getting under the covers. She fluffed up the pillow he had been holding onto. "Good morning, Wendy! Hope you and Dipper had a relaxing night's sleep, nudge, nudge!"

"I have _not_ been sleeping with—that's just a pillow!"

"Uh-huh," Mabel said knowingly. "Did you draw Wendy's face on the pillowcase? You got pretty good at that. Even got the freckles right!"

"Merry Christmas, Mabel," Dipper grumped, giving up and climbing back into the other side of the bed. "It's cold!" He pulled the blanket up over him.

"This sucks, being wide awake at this time of the morning. I hate not being able to run down and find presents under the tree." Mabel sighed.

"Yeah, well, we're not little kids any more, Sis," Dipper said, though his voice held a little nostalgia, too.

Mabel perked up. "Well—one day we'll have kids of our own, and we can enjoy it again! You and Wendy will probably have _adorable_ red-haired twins, and me and Pacifica can adopt."

"I wish you wouldn't keep suggesting that Wendy and— _wait, what_?"

"Hah! Always so gullible!" Mabel said. "Just teasing, Brobot. _That_ woke you up, I bet! I dunno, maybe eventually me and Teek might have a family of our own—what do you think? We got a chance?"

"Mabel," Dipper told her, "that's a question only you and Teek can answer. He's coming over today, right?"

"Yeah, sometime before noon. He's gonna drive over in his car. It's a 2010 Ford Fusion."

"I saw it at Thanksgiving," he reminded her. "It's silver."

"Oh, yeah, I forgot. Bummer, though. He can't take me for a ride in it, 'cause he hasn't had his license for six months."

Oregon laws forbade a licensed teen driver—one under 18, anyway—from driving a vehicle with a passenger under the age of 20 for the first six months, unless an adult passenger was also in the car. It was one of the laws that Wendy had been, well, sort of casual about. Dipper put his hands behind his head. "Well, maybe you can talk Dad into going along," he suggested.

"Huh! Some romantic fun _that_ would be!"

Dipper couldn't hold back a yawn. "What time is it, anyway?"

Mabel rolled on her side to look at the clock radio. "Umm—four o'clock on the nosey."

"Four!" Dipper groaned. "Mabel, it'll be hours before everybody's awake!"

"Yeah, sorry. Hey, did the snow get here?"

Dipper glanced at the window. "Can't see anything. Too dark."

"Maybe there'll be snow. We saw some on the way in from Portland. It was kinda getting melty, though, until we got up in the mountains. Lots of it there!"

"Snow would be fun," Dipper said, yawning again.

"Snowball fights," Mabel murmured. "Maybe make a snowman. It might come to life. I mean, this is Gravity Falls."

"Oh, you know what? I was thinking that later today, we ought to take a food package over to the Gnomes," Dipper said. "I learned that every year about ten to twenty per cent of them used to die of starvation in the winter. They have it rough."

"Maybe their new queen is reforming the government and Gnormalizing food distribution."

"Doubt it. What does a badger know about winter? Don't they hibernate?"

"Do they?" Mabel asked.

"I was asking _you_!"

"Well, don't! Brobro, wildlife biology is your thing, not mine. Hey, here's your phone—call Wendy and ask her! She'd know!"

"Are you nuts?" Dipper asked. "Wake her up at four in the morning—"

"Are you and her gonna run this morning?"

"No. Holiday."

"Oh, right. I wonder if badgers do hibernate."

"Oh, for—" Dipper got out of bed, retrieved his laptop from the desk where it was charging, and hopped back in, sitting with his legs under the cover and his back against the headboard. "Hang on."

After the screen lit up, Dipper went online and typed in a Goggle search. The first page that came up was badger-intensive, and he read the article silently. "OK, no, badgers don't hibernate in the winter. They do get less active and periodically they sleep for up to thirty hours at a stretch, though."

"That's my kind of mustelid!" Mabel said.

"Mustelid? How'd you even _know_ that?"

"Lucky guess. Hey, wait, what's this?" Mabel seemed to be holding up something invisible.

"I give up," Dipper said. "What, did you find a cobweb? Hey!" He squinted as Mabel switched on the bedside lamp. Over dark-blue pajama bottoms she was wearing her old lavender sleep shirt with the floppy-disk emblem. She didn't give up anything easily.

"I knew it!" she said triumphantly, bouncing on her knees with her hands two feet apart in front of her face, as though balancing an invisible tray. "I knew it, I _knew_ it!"

"What?" Dipper asked irritably.

She leaned over and looped something he couldn't see over his head, and when she pulled back, he felt a tug on the back of his neck. "What—?"

"A hair!" Mabel said jubilantly. "A _red_ hair! Three feet long! In your _bed_! I knew it, I knew it, I knew it, you reprobate trifler, you! Boop! Wendy _was_ in your bed! Ha!"

Frantically, Dipper urged, "Shh-shh-shh! Mabel, be quiet! Wendy was in the _room,_ OK? I mean, she slept in _your_ room, she came in here when we got ready for our run and all, and maybe she, I dunno, sat on the edge of the bed to tie her shoes—"

Letting go of the hair, Mabel patted his cheek and then pooched his face, giving him a fish-mouth and shutting him up. "Dipper! Shh! Dipper! Broman, you don't have to make any excuses! This is _Mabel_! It's OK." She let go of his cheeks.

"Well—OK." Dipper sighed. "Just don't get goofy notions and give Mom and Dad any wrong ideas, all right?"

"On one condition," Mabel said softly.

"What's that?"

Quietly, and in a sweetly melancholy and surprisingly sincere tone, Mabel said, "You gotta tell me—what's it like?"

* * *

By the time everyone was up—around eight-thirty—Dipper had finally convinced Mabel that nothing like what she had imagined had really happened. Mabel looked disappointed.

"And don't you get any ideas about starting anything with Teek," Dipper warned. "You and I aren't in a race. It's not like matching pancake syrups, you know!"

"I know, I know," Mabel moped. "But girls mature faster than boys."

"Keep that in mind," Dipper said. "You don't want to get T.K. in trouble!"

"Yeah, right," Mabel said. She shrugged. "Maybe I'll put it off a year or so."

"More than that," Dipper insisted.

After a few moments of silence, Mabel spoke again, softly: "Wendy says that Robbie and Tambry got sort of carried away and went too far. And that's why they had to get engaged, because of their folks catching them. But they're really, truly in love. I did an awesome job of match-making. I mean, they're a perfect couple. Too bad I couldn't completely change their natures, though. Last night Wendy told me that in some ways, Robbie still can be a stinky jerk."

"Whoa, you're the one who felt so sorry for him. Anyway, Robbie's lots better than he used to be," Dipper reminded her.

"You wouldn't say that if you know what I know," Mabel teased. "He still hits on Wendy!"

Dipper glared at his sister. "He does not."

"OK," Mabel said with a shrug. "If that's what you want to think, OK. Forget I said anything—hey, I hear people walking around. Let's get dressed! Present time!"

The McGuckets had set up an impressive Christmas tree in the entrance hall, a twelve-foot-tall Noble Fir, scenting the air with a fresh balsam aroma—it was so tall that the star at the top barely escaped scratching the ceiling. It glittered and twinkled with a thousand colorful lights and hung thick with ornaments, some of them built by Fiddleford. Those made by him were the ones to avoid, because some of them were armed. An immense pile of brightly wrapped and ribboned presents spread out under the tree.

Everyone gathered around, including Tate, the McGuckets' son. Dipper was a little late, because he had been on the phone. Though Mabel was clenching and unclenching her hands in anticipation of wrapper ripping, Dipper said, "Wendy will be over in ten minutes. Can we wait just that long?"

And Mabel was outvoted, six to one. "OK," she said in a grumpy voice. "But I'm holding this one on my lap until then!" She had picked a large blue-and-white wrapped package, from her mom and dad to her, as her preferred opening opener.

Then Wendy sauntered in, wearing Dipper's trucker's hat and her heavy dark-green wool coat. "Dudes! It's thirty-one degrees and snowing!"

They all crowded to the front door to see. The leaden sky was sifting down a heavy, constant fall of big, fluffy flakes, feather-falling slowly through the windless air, and they were sticking to the grass already and were whitening the pine boughs. "Oh, come on!" Mabel wailed from behind them, where she still sat on the sofa with the present on her knees. "First things first!"

"Wendy!" Fiddleford said as they sat down again. "We're mighty glad your daddy is doin' good. That there is the last Christmas tree he delivered afore his accident, and it's a foot-stompin' humdinger!"

"It's beautiful!" Wendy said. "Let me take a picture of it, and I'll show it to him. Everybody get in front of it!"

"Aw, man!" Mabel complained. She posed, but she refused to let go of her package. As soon as Wendy took the photo, Mabel jumped back on the couch. " _Now_ are we ready?"

"Get ready! Get set!" Dipper aimed his forefinger at the ceiling and fired an imaginary starting pistol. When he said, " _Bang,_ " Mabel ripped away and exclaimed, "Oh, my gosh, you guys! Thank you, Mom and Dad!"

"What is it, Mabes?" Wendy asked.

Mabel held up a transparent, multilayered box, absolutely crammed with trial-sized tubes, pans, containers, jars and make-up pencils and brushes. "The Snazz Beauty Cosmetics Kit! Mom, you said I wasn't old enough!"

"You are now," her mother said with a hint of resignation in her voice, like General Cornwallis when he told George Washington in a self-pitying whimper, "Oh, very well, sir! I capitulate! I throw in the sponge! Toss in the towel! Concede the innings! I cease and desist! I—" Well, you get the idea. Cornwallis shot off his mouth a lot, something that General Washington began to consider doing for him.

Anyway, Mrs. Pines went on, "But please, Mabel—you have twenty different foundations, half a dozen mascaras, a dozen blushes, a dozen different nail colors, a dozen different lipsticks—and all the rest. Please, please— _don't_ try them all on at once, and _don't_ finish them up with spray-on glitter!"

Dipper received a new digital camera, 40-megapixel resolution, low-light capable, both optical and electronic zoom, with Bluetooth, so he could send photos or videos wirelessly to his computer.

Fiddleford opened a package containing a handsome overcoat, and Mayellen one that held a lovely coat, scarf, and hat ensemble. Their son received a new suit, very sharp-looking. Stan gave Ford two airline tickets to Paris—for the honeymoon—and Ford gave Stan a gift certificate for a five-night stay at any one of scores of four-star hotels, for the same reason. Mom and Dad gave each other matching plush bathrobes—and in the pocket of each robe, a new mobile phone.

"Here," Mabel said, carefully handing Wendy a cubical, rather heavy box. "I didn't want you to be left out. Open this one first."

"Aw, Mabes! Thanks, girl." Wendy unwrapped it and opened the box and took out something swathed in tissue paper and gasped. "Oh, Mabel! Did you—oh, thank you so much!" And she hugged Mabel.

"What is it?" Dipper asked, craning to see.

Wendy wiped away a tear. "It's beautiful. Look."

She held up a gleaming, bronze-colored sculpture, about eight inches wide and six tall. Dipper whispered, "Wow! Sis!"

"It was my third art project," Mabel said. "And this one was the first one of that casting."

Mabel had obviously used three different photos from her scrapbook as inspiration. Everyone looked at the gift—an impeccable miniature representation of the Gravity Falls gang: a relaxed, smiling Wendy sitting on a stump, long legs crossed, Dipper standing with arms crossed close beside her, Ford and Stan next to him, both leaning on a rail fence, and on the right a happy Mabel sitting on a log between Waddles and Widdles. In the foreground, Soos and Melody sat cross-legged on the grass, Soos holding their son, and Abuelita smiled from where she hovered behind them, her hands on their shoulders. The likenesses were wonderful.

"This is really excellent!" Mom said, staring at the sculpture.

"You have quite a talent," Ford told Mabel. "I had no idea you were such an accomplished artist."

"Yeah," Stan said, hugging her. "Pumpkin, you're a wonder!"

Wendy sniffled. "This is so cool! It's like a moment frozen in time. I mean, one of those perfect moments you always want to remember. Mabel, this means so much to me."

And . . . well, from there the day went on splendidly. Mabel had similar cast sculptures for everyone. They all enjoyed a hearty late breakfast.

Teek did make it over at a little past ten, as did Lorena and Sheila, who showed up right behind him. Six inches of snow in all fell, leading to an epic, hilarious snowball war out on the front lawn.

Then came hot cider and steaming cocoa and lots of hugs and laughter and more present exchanges, followed by the kids going outside again to walk in the snow and thank each other—and as soon as they were out of sight of the house, their paths diverged, Teek and Mabel getting some very warm personal time in some secret hideaway of their own and Wendy and Dipper doing the same in the shelter of the woods.

"Hey," Wendy said to Dipper as they started back toward the house, crunching over the fresh snowfall and holding hands, "Want to ride up to Morris with me? I got my snow tires on, and the DOT will have the main roads de-iced. I gotta go see Dad and the boys for an hour or so, and Aunt Sallie practically ordered me to bring you back, even if I had to hog-tie you."

"Let me think," Dipper said, pretending to ponder. "Half an hour alone with you in the car on the way up and another half-hour alone with you when we come back. Hmm. An hour alone with my Lumberjack girl. Tough decision. Guess I'll have to say yes."

She shoved him playfully, they wrestled in high spirits, and laughing, both toppled to the snow-covered ground, where Wendy straddled Dipper and pinned him down and ordered, "Make me a snow angel and I'll let you up!"

"I don't know," he said, lying still in the snow and gazing up at her with an adoring smile. "I think maybe I like you just the way you are right now, being a little bit of a snow devil!" For that he had to endure a little tickling and a lot of kissing. And freezing-cold snow down the collar of his coat and shirt.

 _Worth it!_

But the two did get up, eventually, and they dusted the snow off each other and drove off to see Manly Dan and Aunt Sallie, and so Christmas day went on, later winding up with a quick food-laden visit to the Gnomes and then, in the mansion, with a family feast that left even Mabel too full for dessert.

All in all, the day turned out to be another one of those perfect moments that, as Wendy said, you just wish you could hang onto forever.


	20. Chapter 20

**20: Ceremonies**

 _ **(Friday and Saturday, December 26-27, 2014)**_

* * *

An overcast, cold Friday brought the wedding rehearsal. Soos had decorated the big parlor—it had been the dance hall for the parties at the Shack—with white garlands and tall vases that, come Saturday, would hold an abundance of flowers.

A dignified mahogany altar table, rented for the occasion and decorated with more garlands of white silk roses, supported the silver holders and candles that would be part of the service.

Folding chairs provided all the seating the guests needed—it was to be a small private service, with only family and very close friends invited, though the reception, to be held in the former Northwest Manor, now the McGucket house, had a huge guest list, practically the whole town. Since Fiddleford had bought the place, no one had ever pulled the lever that locked the gates to the town.

Melody would provide the wedding music, courtesy of Soos's keyboard—though she gently turned aside Soos's suggestions for the exciting addition of sound effects that might enliven the wedding. The Reverend Dr. Gaspell, a bespectacled, kind-looking, slight, balding and elderly man who presided at the church the Corduroys attended, had genially agreed to perform the nondenominational service.

Mabel, serving as Maiden of Honor to both brides, also served to a degree as the commanding officer in the run-up to the rehearsal: "More garlands! More, I say! Brighter lights! Now _filter_ those lights! Light orange gels! We want them to be flattering! Do you hear me? _Flattering_!"

"Dawg," Soos had said admiringly when he first saw Mabel that Friday morning, "you look beautiful!"

"Wait until you see me in my dress!" Mabel shot back as she ordered Teek to climb up and gel two more lights.

Soos had supposed she would wear the outfit she had on for the rehearsal to the wedding as well: a blue and yellow sweater with an appliqué of wedding bells, and instead of a skirt she wore faded, ripped jeans. However, the big guy wisely just smiled and nodded. "Lookin' forward to it, Mabel!"

Wendy, a bridesmaid in a red flannel shirt, boots, and jeans, looked a little uncomfortable. "I'm gonna stand out," she confided to Dipper. "I'll look like a beanpole in that dress I gotta wear. I mean, it's a pretty dress, but I'm all tall and gawky!"

"You'll be beautiful," Dipper told her.

She gave him her crooked smile. "Aw. You have to say that."

"Yeah, I do," Dipper agreed. But then he added, "Because it's true."

"Greenery!" Mabel ordered, pointing at the walls. "I want greenery around every window _now_!"

"On it, Mabes. Come on, Dip," Wendy said, and she took Dipper with her to gather some in the woods.

They found a part of the forest that had become a little overgrown and could stand some thinning. "I'm sorry your dad can't be here," Dipper told her as they used her axe and some loppers to trim a pile of low-hanging, snow-free pine boughs and—carefully, since the leaves were so thorny—some long sprigs of dark-green English holly.

"We can take as much of this stuff as we want," Wendy told Dipper as they stored the holly in a heavy cloth sack. "It's classified as an invasive plant in Oregon." She smiled. "Yeah, and now that you mention it, I'm sorry Dad's laid up, too. He would love to be here for the wedding. Stan's his best friend in town, and Dad likes and respects Ford. Plus, he's got a sentimental streak that's, like, a mile wide."

"You know what?" Dipper asked as he snipped another holly branch. "I could set up a camera to record the whole thing. We could also live-stream it, so your dad could see it on a computer. Uh—does your aunt have one?"

"She's not from the Middle Ages, dude!" Wendy said, laughing in puffs of white vapor as she held the sack open for him. "Yeah, she does. And that's a great idea, man. Yeah, let's go for it! And I'll make sure that Dad knows you thought of him. This is enough. It's dang cold out here, so let's get back."

She phoned as they lugged the sacks of greenery back to the Shack, and Aunt Sallie immediately agreed to set up the computer. "Heck, I'll connect it to the flat-screen so's we can all watch!" she said. "You fix yourself up pretty, now, Wendy! Don't shame the family!"

"Don't worry," Wendy told her. "Got the dress, been fitted, and Mabel's doing my hair. That's Dipper's sister. She's an expert at these things."

And so that was arranged. Mabel kept them both busy all morning, for which Dipper was grateful—he was serving as Stan's groomsman, and the thought of standing up there in front of everybody made him increasingly jittery. He had duties to remember and perform.

For one thing, since Fiddleford still was forgetful, especially short-term, Dipper had been entrusted as a kind of ring-bearer. He had charge of both sets of wedding rings, bright gold bands for Sheila and Lorena and matching ones for Ford and Stan—made from nuggets, Dipper learned, that Stan had rescued from the cave near Ghost Falls.

Mabel tried to make things easy for him: Sheila's and Ford's wedding rings were in a small white ring box, Lorena's and Stan's in a pale blue one, so he wouldn't get them mixed up. Narrow white ribbons loosely tied each pair of rings together, so one ring couldn't be accidentally dropped to roll Lord knew where. Yet Dipper still felt plagued by the certainty that he'd lose one or the other or both, or fumble the hand-off, or otherwise embarrass himself.

"Relax. You got this, dude," Wendy said encouragingly a good many times when he started to look frantic.

The actual rehearsal went well. The patient Dr. Gaspell talked them through the procedure, and then they practiced walking in and where they would stand. Lorena and Ford would be on the left side facing the altar, with Mabel beside Lorena and best-man Fiddleford beside Ford; then Sheila and Stanley, then Alex Pines as the other best man—"Second-best man," Dipper's dad joked—and then Dipper.

Lorena had no father and no living older male relative, so Soos agreed to present her at the altar. Sheila's older brother, who owned a cloth shop in Gravity Falls, would do that for Stan's fiancée. They all walked through it twice, with Dipper miming handing the rings first to Fiddleford, then to his dad, and things went along without a hitch. "Once you've done that, you can be seated," the minister told him the first time through, and after the second practice he gratefully settled in the chair reserved for him.

In addition to Mabel as Maiden of Honor, each bride had three bridesmaids, all but Wendy—one of Sheila's ladies—older women who were friends of the brides. They were obviously wedding veterans, and obviously very fond of Lorena and Sheila, and all of them knew Wendy and her father well. They chatted and seemed to settle Wendy's nerves down, and by the end of the practice, she was smiling and laughing.

Then Dipper could relax at last. He and Wendy sat together at the rehearsal dinner, but they cut out early. "Gonna be a big day tomorrow," Wendy said.

Mabel caught up with them outside the restaurant. "Not so fast, you two! You and me and Teek are gonna go make sure all the greenery is put up right!"

"Can't it wait until tomorrow morning?" Dipper asked with a groan.

"Nope! Teek, am I right?"

Teek, who was going to be an usher, grinned in a silly kind of way. Dipper suspected he had secretly missed Mabel's habit of ordering him around, and that the two of them had already snuck off to some cozy corner for some snuggling and smooching.

They drove back to the Shack in two cars—Teek staunchly alone, since he said he couldn't afford to break the law, not with his dad trusting him with the car. Wendy opened the place with her key, they broke out two of Soos's stepladders (unlike Stan, Soos didn't fear having ladders in the place), and they got to work.

Mabel stayed on the floor and supervised, but the holly and pine went up easily and, sure enough, did a handsome job of setting off all the white garlands. They added a fresh woodsy fragrance, too.

When it was all done, Mabel brought Waddles and Widdles in to inspect their work and offer their consulting expertise. "OK, what do you two think?"

They nosed about the floor, gazed vacantly around the hall, and grunted. "That's the official seal of approval!" Mabel announced. "OK, you guys, we're all set—oh, Widdles, no! Teek, go get a mop and some pine-scented spray cleaner from the closet. You know where they are. Come on, Waddles, don't you get any ideas! Out, pigs, out! And don't step in the puddle on the way!"

When the accident had been attended to, Mabel and Teek settled in to watch a little TV in the parlor. Wendy and Dipper walked outside into the early night. "I love this place so much," Dipper said, his hands deep in his pockets. They paused in the yard and gazed back at the Shack, its steep roof white with the new-fallen snow, icicles beginning to picket the eaves.

In the early darkness, the eccentric log house looked like a Christmas card: the roof floodlights weren't on, but a warm yellow glow streamed through the windows and spread across the snow, and white-draped trees stood like memories in the still night behind the house. Over it all, a crescent moon shone up in the cold, clearing sky and gleamed on the snow cover.

"Yeah, it really looks good," Wendy agreed, "but what makes it _great_ are the people." She reached inside his coat pocket and squeezed his hand. "Your Grunkle Stan is a con artist and a conniver and has a rotten sense of humor—and I love him like a grandfather!"

"He's . . . pretty cool," Dipper said, grasping her hand.

Wendy sighed with a long, moon-silvered plume of vapor. "Man, I'm glad he and Ford both found somebody nice. They deserve happiness."

"They do," Dipper agreed.

Wendy took a deep breath. "This reminds me so much of a night in the winter of 2008. January, it was. About this much snow on the ground. 'Bout as cold. Same kind of crescent moon rising, sky full of stars. And I went out all on my own to soak in the beauty and stupidly tried to jump across a creek in the dark."

"What happened?"

"Broke my arm. Not bad, just slipped on an ice-covered boulder, took a bad spill onto rocks. I tried to catch myself and fractured my left ulna, not far above the wrist. Hurt like hell, though. Here, feel." She pulled up her coat sleeve and guided his fingers. He felt the smooth bone, then a small irregularity. "Yeah, right there."

"Did you—well, obviously, you got back home all right."

"Yep. Staggered back with tears runnin' down my face, cradling my left arm with my right. Dad took one look and said, 'Get in the truck!' Back then, we didn't even have a doctor in town."

"What did you do?"

"Oh, Dad drove me up to the hospital in Morris—same one he was in—and I got treated in the emergency room. They had to cut my shirt off me 'cause my arm had swelled up. Then they reset the bone, slapped on a cast— _pink_ , 'cuz I was out of it and had no say about the color, man!—and finally they gave me a sling. We got back home about two A.M. Then the next morning after bein' zonked out on painkillers so I could sleep a little, I had to get up and cook breakfast, like always, and even though I had my arm in a danged sling, nobody even offered to help me. Anyways, it hurt but wasn't a serious break. Took about three months for it to heal. Wasn't too bad."

"I've never broken anything," Dipper said.

Wendy laughed. "Don't be disappointed. You haven't missed much, dude! But I kinda know how Dad feels. It's frustrating to be laid up when you're used to being active. It's real sweet of you to arrange for the camera and all. Oh, who's going to operate it?"

"I spoke to Toby Determined, and he said he'd do it for free, as a wedding present to Stan and Ford. He'll be OK. He's not bad as a cameraman."

Wendy laughed. "Well, he practiced a lot with concrete blocks." She shivered. "Let's get back inside. At least it's supposed to warm up a little tomorrow."

* * *

At about nine, after Soos, Melody, and Abuelita returned home, the teens said their goodnights. Teek drove himself back to his house, and in her Dodge Dart, Wendy ran Mabel and Dipper over to the McGucket mansion.

"We gotta get together on Sunday when all this is over," Mabel said on the way. "Dip and I have to go back to Piedmont on January fourth! We gotta hurry and lay out our investigation of this Spikeface murder-snake-sending guy!"

"We've got time, Mabes," Wendy assured her.

"Well, I want to pull Teek in on it, too," she said. "Even if he refuses to let me ride in his car. You didn't do that when you first got your license!"

Wendy agreed, "Yeah, I'm pretty casual about stuff like that. Good thing I never got busted by the cops!"

When Wendy let them out in front of the McGucket house, she got out, too. "Goodnight, you guys."

"You two can go ahead and kiss," Mabel said. "I know what you've been up to!"

Quickly, before Wendy could react to that, Dipper said, "Mabel! I told you, when Wendy stayed over, she slept in your room!"

Mabel did a downward slapping gesture. "Yeah, yeah, get over it. And get it over with! Let me see your technique."

Wendy and Dipper hugged and kissed. From the sidelines, Mabel said, "Not bad, not bad. I'd recommend a foot pop, though, Wendy!"

"Not my style," Wendy murmured, with her forehead resting against Dipper's and her warm breath sweet with the scent of a fresh peppermint candy.

* * *

And the wedding—well, it went off just the way they'd rehearsed.

Melody started playing the soft processional music. Ford, Fiddleford, Stan, Alex, and Dipper came in the side door and waited with Dr. Gaspell at the altar. The bridesmaids walked down the aisles, all beautiful, Wendy especially glamorous in a pale-green satin dress with her hair done up in a Mabel special—part of it braided into a headband, the rest falling in curls to the small of her back.

She'd even agreed to minimal make-up, blush and light lipstick and a little something with her eyes that made her look, well, prettier, but Dipper preferred her usual natural appearance. Like the other bridesmaids, Wendy carried a floral posy—the brides' bouquets were larger, made up of full-blown pink hothouse roses, but the bridesmaids carried sprays of delicate rosebuds wrapped in lace.

Then Mabel, escorted by Teek, made her entrance, Teek in a tux, like the grooms and Dipper, Mabel resplendent in a long pink satin gown and with her hair bunched in what looked like a low bun on the nape of her neck. Following them, Isabelle Leckie, Lorena's little blonde six-year-old grand-niece, walked down the aisle as flower girl, gravely scattering rose petals.

That was the cue for a change in the music, and Melody segued into Mendelssohn's "Wedding March" as Lorena and Sheila entered side by side, both glowing and lovely in their white wedding dresses. The service went on, and when Dr. Gaspell asked "Who presents Lorena to her groom and this assembly?", Soos, looking proud in his best Mr. Mystery suit and red tie, said, "I do."

Dipper breathed a sigh of relief. At rehearsal, his first response had been a cheery "Oh, hey, dawg, that's, like, me, Soos!"

Sheila's brother presented her, and then Soos and he sat down. Dipper began to squirm, feeling self-conscious, and kept checking to make sure he had the two ring boxes in his pocket. He did.

He had not previously heard the vows that Ford and Stan had prepared, but they were simple and really—eloquent. Even Stan's, "Sheila, my loving you has made my life richer. I will always treasure you and will do everything in my power to make you happy" sounded sincere and caused Abuelita to break down in sobs and murmurs of "It is so beautiful!"

Her weeping set off a rippling cascade of tears among the women in the congregation. Even Wanda, Dipper's and Mabel's mom, normally very calm and composed, began to dab her flowing eyes with a tissue.

The elder Mystery Twins and their brides lit the candles together. Then the minister went on into the ceremony. Dipper produced the rings in their color-coded boxes, turned them over to Fiddleford McGucket and Alex Pines without a hitch, and from there it all went according to plan. After he had handed Stan's and Sheila's rings to the minister, Dipper's dad came and sat beside him, his arm over Dipper's shoulders.

When Dr. Gaspell said, "I pronounce you husbands and wives. You may kiss," Ford and Lorena exchanged a chaste peck, and Stan swept Sheila around and dipped her. And she popped a foot.

And . . . it was over.

* * *

Afterward, Wendy called her dad and aunt, and Aunt Sallie said, "It came through real clear and the sound was good. It was beautiful, honey, and so were you. I've told you and told you, you look stunning in a dress! Dan'd talk to you, except he can't stop crying."

"Somethin' in my _eye!"_ Dan yelled in the background, but Wendy could hear him snuffling.

Toby promised to provide still photos and prepare DVDs for both couples—and for Mabel, who wanted one, too, and for the Corduroy family, because Dan had asked, and for Fiddleford. In the end, Mr. Pines made him agree to take some money—just an honorarium, but generous.

People mingled in the room as Dipper's father discreetly turned the envelope with Dr. Gaspell's check (plus a cash tip he slipped in himself) over to the minister. Then after that, Mr. Pines asked Dipper to perform just one more duty, later that afternoon at the reception. "Your great-uncles have specially requested it," he said.

The best men were supposed to give the first toast—but a relieved Fiddleford and an understanding Alex delegated that task to Dipper, who hadn't expected this. He had no chance to plan anything out, but he thought about it.

When the time came, Dipper stood with his champagne glass (filled with sparkling grape juice) and said, "Friends and family, when my sister Mabel and I were twelve years old, we met our great-uncles for the first time. Before that first summer was over, we loved them both, and we understood what family really means.

"They're great men and I'm honored to be their nephew. Grunkle Stanford, your intelligence and care are a model I hope to follow. Grunkle Stanley, your love and concern for family are my constant inspiration. Lorena, in Stanford you're getting a wonderful husband. May you always explore the mysteries of the world together in love! Sheila, your husband Stanley will give you continual surprises. Enjoy and cherish every single one of them. Everyone, please join me in wishing a long, happy, and loving life to Stanford and Lorena and Stanley and Sheila Pines!"

As they all raised their glasses, his father beamed and gave him a thumbs-up. Dipper, who usually got less attention from his dad than Mabel did, felt a little bit like Manly Dan—as if he had something in his eye.

And soon after that, with Soos as DJ playing lots of retro music, Dipper and Wendy slow-danced together, joining others on the dance floor. Mabel and Teek had already danced, and now Mabel floated by, standing on her Grunkle Stan's feet as he did a surprisingly graceful waltz.

Wendy looked so happy. She had changed to a simple lavender dress, but Dipper hardly noticed what she wore, because he really only saw her sleepy green eyes and her contented smile. And now, finally, after lots of practice, and with the aid of his and Wendy's touch-telepathy, and like his Grunkle Stan, he danced smoothly.

Late that afternoon, at the end of it all, when the brides and grooms were heading for their cars, departing for the honeymoons, a squeeing Mabel caught one of the bouquets.

Wendy didn't, but she didn't seem to care. In fact, she put her arm around Dipper, pulled him tight, and murmured, "That's OK, I'm not jealous. I already got what _I_ want."


	21. Chapter 21

**Chapter 21: Cold Trail**

* * *

 **(Sunday, December 28, 2014)**

 **From the Journals of Dipper Pines:** _Sunday: Grunkle Stan had already arranged for the limo, and this morning the driver picked up Mom and Dad for the drive over to the airport in Portland. Wendy said she was mad because she's not old enough to drive a limo (you have to be 25, I think), but I told her if she was, that would make it all the harder for us._

 _Abuelita, who really hates cold weather, rode along with them to catch a flight to Mexico City, where one of her daughters, Soos's Aunt Teresa, will pick her up. She has three daughters down there, all married with children, and she'll spend the rest of the winter visiting them all. She was wearing the colorful shawl that Mabel knitted for her and just before she got in the limo, she told Mabel, "Now I will be a fashionable plate in Mexico!"_

 _The flight went smoothly, Mom and Dad said when they called from Piedmont about one in the afternoon to tell us they were back safely. Dad said that he'd made sure that Abuelita got on the flight to Mexico OK, too._

 _Man. Down in Piedmont, the moving vans show up tomorrow, and by Wednesday everything will be in the new house. I can't help feeling a little sad about that. I try to hide it from Mabel, who gets teary-eyed and sentimental about moving from our old house, but I feel that way too._

 _Mom promises that she'll set up our rooms just the way they should be, so we can destroy them the day we get back to Piedmont. For Mom, that's a joke._

 _About as soon as the limo drove away, Mabel and I said goodbye to Fiddleford and Mayellen and went back to the Shack with Wendy! I like Fiddleford and his wife and all, but the Shack really feels like home._

 _Wendy's moving from the attic bedroom down to Abuelita's, Mabel's in the guest room, and I'll have the attic again! Just like old times. Wendy said she really should move back into her house, but Melody has told her she needs her help, so she's decided to stay on. But she drives over once a day to check on Casa Catastrophe, which is what she calls the Corduroy house. So far, so good!_

 _Oh, and as of today, Junior has come to stay with his Aunt Sallie and Manly Dan. He's got leave from his job as a foreman with the International Woody Products Company (or something like that—I don't remember. Note: Ask Wendy). Tomorrow the doctor will examine Dan again and if his leg's healing OK, he'll get to come back to Gravity Falls with Junior and the boys on the sixth of January. Wendy may go get her brothers right after she sees Mabel and me off on January 4, so they won't miss a day of school._

 _I think Dan will be able to come home on schedule. He was getting around pretty good on crutches when we visited on Christmas, and Wendy says that Sallie's habit of driving him crazy will make him obey the doctor's orders._

 _She also tells me that Junior's not as mean as he used to be, though he still teases her and rubs her the wrong way. He's like his dad, real competitive, and the truth is that Wendy could be a better lumberjack—lumberjill?—than he is if she put her mind to it. She always beat him in lumberjack games! But at least she'll be staying here while her dad recuperates, so there won't be much opportunity for sibling friction._

 _Dr. Le Fievre at the clinic here has already arranged for three-day-a-week sessions of rehab for Dan. The cast will probably have to stay on for approximately two months (might be that it has to be changed before then, but Dan will have to wear one for about two months, anyway), and then Dan will have physical therapy until he can walk normally again. He should be able to get around with a cane after the two months, and then if he improves as expected, he can go back to work full-time in May or June. Wendy says he insists he's going to build Ford's and Stan's houses personally!_

 _So . . .OK. here I am, settling down in the attic. I take a deep breath and can smell the piny scent of the logs and the musty aroma of dust and mold. Man, it's good to be back!_

* * *

Mabel enjoyed being back, too, especially getting reacquainted with her two pigs. Widdles was not nearly as big as her father—he was massive now—but she was still an endearing animal, and Waddles obviously remembered and adored Mabel.

Mabel spent a couple of hours with her porcine buddies, who had not only a sty but a small heated pig house of their own, packed with sweet hay for them to burrow in and sleep in. Contrary to popular beliefs, pigs are normally clean animals, especially if they have room to roam, which these two did. And Soos changed the hay every other day, so Mabel enjoyed her visit and between the low-powered heater and the hay and the body heat of two pigs, she wasn't uncomfortable.

That evening after dinner, Soos suddenly slapped himself on the forehead. "Oh, man! All day I've been thinking there's something I forgot to remember, but I couldn't remember what it was I, like forgot! Dipper, dawg, I was supposed to give an envelope to you as soon as Dr. Pines and his wife left."

Dipper, in the middle of clearing the table, said, "Well, give it to me now."

"Sure thing, dude!" Soos stood behind his chair, scratching his head. "Um. So where did I put it?"

Fortunately, Melody had a good idea of where it was, and Soos went to the bedroom, looked, and brought back a thick manila envelope. "Here you go, Dipper. I hope I didn't mess up."

"No, I'm sure it's fine," Dipper told him. He took a quick peek at what was inside and then went ahead and helped Wendy and Mabel with the cleaning-up. However, he told them to come upstairs immediately so they could go through the dossier.

Because that was what Ford had left for him: about twenty sheets of print-out paper with his typed notes and a few things downloaded from the Web. The three teens sat on the floor in the attic and Dipper read the cover sheet aloud:

* * *

 _Mason:_

 _I have been researching our problem whenever I've had a few moments. What I have turned up doesn't amount to much, but I've included copies of it all here for you. Let me preface all this by saying that at least I don't believe there is any immediate danger._

 _All indications are that whoever was ultimately behind the cursed object (I mean the CD case) is nowhere near Gravity Falls and very likely is not even aware that the case was somehow activated to release its imprisoned creature._

 _That is not to say that danger may not come! Frequently such a magically-charged artifact creates a psychic bond between itself and its creator (or user). The person who is responsible for this may now be aware that the creature was released and subsequently banished. Whether he, or she, perhaps, will investigate further what happened to the artifact is anyone's guess. I do not see how anyone could connect it to Gravity Falls, however._

 _I will be in touch when I return from our honeymoon. You have my computer phone number. If you have any suspicion that something uncanny is going on, more than the ordinary background weirdness of Gravity Falls, get in touch with me immediately!_

 _That is all for now. I must leave for the wedding. I wish you the best of luck and again caution you—take no chances, and let me know if anything suspicious pops up!_

 _Stanford_

* * *

Dipper saw that the remainder of the material covered three things: the T'klatlumodh, Spikeface Screamer, and "Possible Suspects." He handed the paper-clipped stack of pages about the musician to Mabel, the one about the creature to Wendy, and he kept the list of suspects. "Everybody read these, and then we'll talk about what's in them and trade."

Almost immediately he wished he'd given Wendy the pages about suspects, because she exclaimed, "Oh, dude! No way!" as she read.

When they had all finished, Dipper said, "Wendy, you seemed upset. What is a—Dreamsnake? I can't pronounce the other word!"

Wendy tapped the papers on the floor, straightening them before she clipped them again. "OK, it's bad. This thing's name's not in any known human language, to start with. It shows up in different guises in a bunch of ancient religions, though. It's always, like, an evil spirit. The Zoroastrians, whoever they were, called it "The Breacher of Darkness." Other nations call it "Dark Messenger" or "Bringer of Ills." That's as clear as mud to me. But get this: the T'klatlumodh corrupts and controls people!"

"Wendy!" Mabel exclaimed. "That must be why the song Robbie wrote for you was supposed to make you all "oo, I wuv oo" toward him!"

"May be," Wendy said. "Only I'm sure Robbie didn't know anything about any ancient evil magic. But that might be what made the backwards talk on the recording mess with my mind!"

"Yeah," Mabel said. "'Cause if it wasn't something like magic, the stuff ran backwards, and it oughta have made you hate his guts!"

"Huh?" Dipper asked.

"Backwards is opposite! That's called logic, Brobro!"

Insane troll logic, maybe, Dipper thought, but aloud he said, "Sure. Whatever. What does it say about the thing's nature, Wendy? I mean, how does it work?"

"Not entirely clear on that one, Dip. It's awakened by negative emotions—well, I had a bunch of those back in the fall, 'specially that time I got fed up with Dad and the boys stickin' me with all the housework. I, like, laid awake all night one time just real mad and kinda hatin' on them, to tell you the truth."

"So that woke it up," Dipper said. "Then what?"

"Then it haunts the room where the victim is. It did me. I felt like it was crawlin' all over the floor, every night. And it reinforces negative energy—so I was getting mad real easy, and, man, I was scared at night! Me! I've never been afraid of the dark, but I was starting to be like a little kid with a boogeyman in the closet!"

"We got an invisible wizard!" Mabel said.

"We don't," Dipper told her.

"Oh, yeah? Well, Grenda says he's a great kisser!"

"Anyway," Wendy said, overriding Mabel, "the T'klatlumodh feeds on the negative stuff and kinda amplifies it and fires it back at the victim. It gradually gets strong and starts to be able to take physical form—guess that was about the shape it was in when it attacked us—and then it can absorb people's minds. I mean, not turn 'em into zombies, but just warp them and twist them and corrupt them. Like, I might've given in to all my anger and my—other bad feelings, you know, and then it would've had me. I mean, I'd have turned evil, I guess, and I'd have been a willing slave to whoever commanded the T'klatlumodh! Whoever summoned it could've treated me like a puppet, and I would've done anything that person wanted!"

Mabel coughed into her hand and whispered, "Um, Wendy? Don't mention P-U-P-P-E-T-S around my brother."

"I can spell, Mabel! OK, tell us about Spikeface and his band."

Mabel had messed her pages up, and she spent a moment putting them back in order. "Um, roger that! All right, old Spikeface, get this, was classically trained! He put in some time at Juliard! Pianist! But he dropped out and drifted around. When he was in his late teens and early twenties, he went down to South America for a couple of years. Brazil, Argentina, maybe some other places. When he came back to the USA, he started to get work as a guitarist in San Francisco punk bands. Here are a few pictures of him."

The photos showed Lawrence Blurchard both in and out of character as Spikeface Screamer. When not in the stage make-up (even the spikes were artificial), he was a blank-faced, stoner-looking guy with long shaggy hair and droopy eyes. "Ugly dude," Dipper said.

"I dunno," Wendy told him. "He was a musician. Lotta girls have a thing for musicians."

"Grab your guitar, Brobro!" Mabel said. "Play her a love song, stat!"

"Later, later," Dipper said. "So—what did Ford find out that we didn't know?"

Mabel shuffled through the pages. "Um. OK. Blurchard mixed in with some weirdo characters in his music days. There was something called the Church of Ultimate Indulgence that he associated with. Not a real church, though, a place for stoners and people that fool around with black magic to get together. Grunkle Ford has some possible leads, but he doesn't put them in here. He says let him check them out."

"What does he say exactly?" Dipper asked.

"Um, let me find it . . . 'I have some possible leads, but I won't record them here. Let me check them out.'"

"Must be worried they're dangerous," Wendy murmured.

Mabel suddenly said, "Oh, oh, look at this! We might be able to locate Blurchard's ex, the Razor girl, what's her real name? Here it is. Susan Katarina Flowers Blurchard. Widow, I guess she'd be. Blurchard died of a heart attack in November, 2011. They were living outside of San Rafael when that happened. Ford says the last address he was able to track for her was right after that. Guess what? It's in Mill Valley!"

"Where's that?" Wendy asked.

"Not too far from Piedmont," Dipper told her. "About an hour by car, on the far side of the Bay. We might even be able to check it out."

"Yeah!" Mabel said. "We'll get a van and paint it psychedelic, and Wendy can drive, and Dipper, you can wear a scarf around your neck, and maybe Teek can grow a scruffy little beard and Waddles can act like a Great Dane! He already loves snacks! Hmm wait, I'd have to wear glasses and dress frumpy, though. Bad idea."

"Does Doc Pines warn us not to approach her?" Wendy asked Mabel, ignoring the Scoobiness of it all.

Mabel shook her head. "Nope. Just the number and the street and 'last known address, December 2012.' Hmm. Says she'd be about forty-one or forty-two now, so she must have been, what, in 1992, when she got together in the band with old Screamer?"

"Um, eighteen or nineteen," Dipper said.

"Huh."

"What is it, Mabes?" Wendy asked.

"This pdf page. Looks like part of some kind of police or medical report or something. 'Victim's wife could not account for his sudden heart attack. States he had been in excellent health. She insists foul play. No evidence. She seems irrational.'"

"That's not good," Dipper said. "But still, if we can do it, maybe Mabel and I could somehow get over there and see if she's still living at the address."

"Hang onto that 'maybe.' OK, Dip, lay it out for us: Who are the suspects?"

"Bill Cipher," Dipper said grimly, "is at the top of the list."


	22. Chapter 22

**22: The Unusual Suspects**

* * *

 **(Monday, December 29, 2014)**

"Are you sure about this, Dip?" Wendy asked.

"Gotta try," Dipper said. He was lying on his bed up in the attic of the Shack. Mabel sat on the edge of the bed, and Wendy had pulled up the one chair so she could sit beside Dipper and hold his hand.

"Maybe you should wait until Grunkle Ford comes back," Mabel said, sounding uncharacteristically serious. "He wanted to be your wingman."

"Can't wait," Dipper said. "Ford and Stan won't be back until next Saturday night, and Sunday we have to fly home. I'm not even sure that I can contact Bill from here, anyway. I've been going out to where his statue is in the woods. He hangs around there a lot."

"How can he do that?" Mabel asked. "Isn't he in the Mindscape thingy? Isn't that sort of everywhere?"

"I don't know," Dipper confessed. "It's just that it's easy to get in tune with him there. Wendy, you shouldn't hold my hand."

 _I gotcha, Dipper, and I'm not letting go!_

Dipper answered her telepathic comment: _If we're linked up, you'll get pulled in, too. Bill really messes with me about you._

 _I don't care, Dipper. You're not trying this alone._

"What are you guys doing?" Mabel complained. "That mental voodoo thing? Don't shut me out!"

"I just was telling Wendy that she shouldn't hold my hand while I try to get in touch with Bill," Dipper said.

"Come on, Brobro!" Mabel retorted. "If you and Wendy are soul mates, she's got a right to hang onto you! Besides, I'm here too. If you get in trouble, I got this." She held up an open bottle of ice-cold water. "It's holy water."

"It is not," Dipper said.

"Yeah? Wait until you get in trouble and I squirt it right in your face! Then you'll snap out of it and yell 'Holy sh—'"

"Let her stand by, Dipper," Wendy said. "Since you gotta be unconscious to be in the Mindscape, she can wake you up if things get dicey."

"You better not squirt me with that unless it looks like I'm really struggling! OK, OK, you can hang onto my hand, Wendy. I'm going to try to relax into the Mindscape now."

It was cool up in the attic—not cold, because heat rose in the Shack, but just cool enough to be comfortable. Dipper slowed his breathing, rolled his closed eyes upward as though he were trying to stare into his own head, and let every muscle relax.

Some moments passed as he felt himself drifting and opened his mental eyes. The attic, all right, but in shades of gray.

— _I'm in the Mindscape. You with me, Wendy?_

 _Right here, dude. I've got your hand. This is weird! I'm, like, half in the real world and half in this black-and-white one. What now?_

— _I see you now. You look like an old-time photo in black and white. OK, I'm going to try to summon Bill._

He concentrated. Something was tapping, like a slow woodpecker. Dipper frowned in his light sleep.

— _Tell Mabel to open the window._

 _OK, but it's cold out there!_

For a few seconds he lost consciousness of Wendy and felt awfully alone. Then she was back again. _Window's open._

He vaguely sensed cooler air, but it wasn't quite enough to pull him out of sleep.

— _Bill?_

"Yeah, Pine Tree? What can I do you for?"

— _Wendy, tell Mabel to close the window._

"That won't keep me in, you know. Hey, I recognize this place. We did a deal here that time, right? I got you to be my puppet and you got me to smash that laptop! Those were the days! Well, well, well-well-well! There's Red. Hiya, Red!"

 _Dipper, I can sort of hear his voice, but I can't understand the words. Is he here?_

— _Yeah. He's faint and sort of transparent, but I can see him. And he's looking at you._

"I'm undressing her with my eye, kid! Mm, boy-howdy! By the way, I can actually do that. The gals love it when the lashes tickle! Want to see?"

— _Leave Wendy alone._

 _Wait, Dip, what's he doing to me?_

— _Just trash talking, Wendy. Bill, we want to ask you a few questions._

"Ask me no lies and I'll question you no questions! What's up, kid?"

— _Can you see what Wendy's thinking?_

"Mm, kinda-sorta. It's not a direct connection, so it's a little fuzzy. Right now she's thinking about you, Pine Tree. She's worried."

— _Wendy, think about that leather CD case. Visualize it._

 _OK. Something like this._

— _Bill, look at the picture in Wendy's mind. does this have anything to do with you? I'll know if you're lying._

"Oh, baby! That takes me way back. That's the vessel of T'klatlumodh. Well, one form of it, anyway. It always used to be the leather cover of a book of forbidden lore, like the _Necronomicon,_ or the _Art of the Deal._ What's that, though? Oh, I got it from Red—a music disk cover. What do you want to diskcover about it? Hah! See what I did there?"

— _Bill! Focus. I can't hold onto this for long. Answer the question: Did you create this or send this to Wendy?_

"Axolotl forbid! Nah, kid, this thing houses an evil essence that can trick people and corrupt them. Takes away their conscience and inhibitions. Makes 'em revel in doing harm to others. See, my thing WAS doing harm to others! Why should I invite competition? Not my style, though I admit I might have tempted one or two dizzy wizards with it along the way."

— _Then where do things like this come from?_

"Strictly human creations, Pine Tree. Take a mad evil sorcerer, or maybe from this it could be a mad evil music producer, I don't know, and they can conjure up a vessel. T'klatlumodh always lurks right on the border of madness and sanity, insubstantiality and reality, and it can only manifest with a vessel like that . . . but wait a nano-eon. Hmm. This is strange. Where is it? Where's that snaky at? Here, T'klatlumodh!" Bill whistled. "Here, boy! Come! Who's a good tempter and corrupter, den? Oo's my bad boy?"

Dipper felt Wendy stirring. _What's he doing? Don't let him call up one of those things!_

"Tell her to relax, kid. Just checking. And there's no such thing as 'one of those things.' It's the _only_ thing—the T'klatlumodh is unique, only one of him, her, she, or it, whatever, in all meta-existence. Except it's not there. Can't sense it anywhere, and I would if it was still around even in quasi-existence. It seems to have vanished from the dimension. All neighboring dimensions, in fact. It's gone."

Dipper took a moment to reassure Wendy. Then he thought to Bill:

— _Bill, tell me: Have you ever actually helped anybody summon this thing?_

"Well, I haven't been present for the arrival, but I did most recently make a deal in Europe centuries ago. Just gave the DIY how-to directions, you know, didn't dabble in the summoning. Can't recall the schlub's name, some wannabe wizard, lived in the Harz Mountains. Basically, I just showed him ancient tomes that told how to summon demons and destroy your soul for fun and profit. Didn't work out too well for him, as I recall. But he would've manifested the vessel as a manuscript cover, not a CD case. So this is somebody else's work."

— _Who?_

"Sorry, Pine Tree, don't know. Maybe the original guy passed down the directions over the ages. Now that I'm transitional, I've lost a part of my omniscience. Now it's just some-niscience. Some things I know, some I don't. Tell you what, though: I'll keep a close watch on the Falls, and if anybody shows up who I think has some connection to T'klatlumodh, I'll trouble your dreams. Even in Piedmont! Wait, what are you thinking? You're moving to a new house? Take a tip from a triangle, kid—have Fordsy do a mystical cleansing of the place, just in case! You're losing me. I'm fading . . . what a world, what a world! Tell Shooting Star I'll see you guys later! Oh, my gosh, they got Wendy!"

"What! _Glargh!_ Mabel!"

Mabel blinked. "You were thrashing around! I had to wake you up!"

"It's _cold_!"

"Here, dude, get out of that. It's soaked." Wendy peeled Dipper's dripping shirt up over his head. She began to rub his chest. "Mabel, get Dip a towel and a dry shirt!"

"I wanna watch!" Mabel said. "Warm him up! Look at how hairy his chest is getting!"

"Yeah, but don't let him catch pneumonia! Towel! Shirt!"

"OK, OK." Mabel rummaged in a bureau drawer and tossed a shirt to Wendy. "He's gotta do laundry, this is his last clean one—here's a towel."

"Thanks," Dipper said, drying the freezing water from his chest. "Wendy, are you OK?"

"I'm fine, Dip!"

"Bill scared me—said somebody had trapped you."

"Um—I think he just wanted to make you yell so's Mabel would throw that ice water in your face."

"Which I did!" Mabel said proudly.

"Thanks, Bill, I owe you one," he muttered as he pulled on the dry shirt. "OK, from what I got, Cipher isn't the guy. He says this thing has to be created by a wizard. A human one."

"Was he telling the truth?" Wendy asked. "You know how he lies!"

"I can kind of tell when I'm in the Mindscape," Dipper said. "I have to think he was leveling with me. So—on to the others!"

They reviewed Ford's list of suspects. The second one made Mabel gasp. "I know that face!"

Ford had included a print-out of an old newspaper or magazine article he must have found on a Web archive. The title of the article was "Did They Get Away?"

Dipper scanned it. "It's about Nazis who fled Germany after World War II. Some of them definitely wound up in Argentina. This guy is, let's see . . . Kurt Metzger. Where'd you see him?"

"On the album cover!" Mabel said. "The creepy-faced guy on the death-metal album that was on the poster I found!"

"Get it, Mabes," Wendy said. Mabel clattered downstairs and then back up again, waving the poster for _We Hate You, Go Die._

"Yeah, Robbie's kind of music," Wendy muttered, taking the poster and spreading it out on the floor. Dipper put the print-out sheet with the photo next to it. The one Ford had given Dipper had been photocopied from an already faded original, and showed the man's face in three-quarter view. He had cut his eyes toward the camera and glowered at it. He was wearing what looked like a heavy overcoat with a turned-up collar, but the photo was grainy and blurred.

The teens bent over the two documents, studying them. Dipper got a magnifying glass, which just made the copied picture worse—about all they could see were the dots of ink that had made up the printed picture. "Looks kinda like the same guy," Wendy said slowly. "Same evil-looking eyes, anyway. But the one on the CD case is younger, I think."

"Maybe it's an old picture," Dipper said. "Let me see what this says."

The article wasn't much help—Kurt Metzger had been a captain in the Wehrmacht, the German army. He had been attached to a special unit and had vanished around the time of the fall of Berlin—the Allies wanted him because he had been involved with interrogation of prisoners of war that they branded as torture. Rumors were that he had been seen in Buenos Aires in 1949, four years after the end of World War II. The photo had been taken, the article said, in 1941.

That was all the news article said about him.

However, on the last sheet in the section about Metzger, Ford had written out a paragraph of his own. Dipper read it aloud:

* * *

 _Hauptmann Kurt Gerhardt Metzger: The rank of Hauptmann in the Wehrmacht (German Army) is equivalent to Captain. Metzger worked as a Stabsarzt, or physician. No record of his having completed a medical degree. Specialized in interrogation techniques. Speculation: Had expertise in the use of drugs on subjects of interrogation. Rumors were he was a student of dark magic. Hints of hypnosis or mind control techniques. From Harz Mountain region—legend says one of his ancestors fell under the thrall of the "gelbes Dreieck Teufel" (tr. "yellow triangle devil") in the 1500s, according to Silbersack's_ Mysteries and Magic of Germany _. After war, six surviving Allied POWs (French and British) raved about a black snake that charmed them into cooperating with the enemy. All diagnosed as insane, institutionalized. All died within three years of war's end. Sounds like the form the T'klatlumodh took in Wendy's house. NB: Metzger is said to have summoned the black snake with a leather-bound book "with a monstrous face." Connection to Bill Cipher? Possible Metzger still alive, or was in the 1990s? On source claims that in spring of 1945 he fled to Argentina in the company of a younger man, identified only as a Lehrling (apprentice or acolyte). Never confirmed. Possible to trace him/them? Might be two suspects here. Where to start?_

* * *

"Looks like a definite possibility," Dipper said. "Only—I have no idea how to go about looking for somebody in South America!"

"Leave that one for Ford," Wendy agreed. "Who's the next one?

Dipper said, "Just a couple of sheets on this. OK, I'll read the first one."

* * *

 _Tíz kultusza_

 _Hungarian. Tr: "The Cult of Ten." One of oldest represntations of the Cipher Zodiac engraved on a massive stone, part of the ruined_ Ördög Kastélya _("Devil's Fortress") in the wilds of Borsod-Abauj Zemplen. Estimates of date put it at ca. 900 AD. Fortress was continually expanded and added onto, however, up until the Ottoman invasions of the 1500s._

 _Spoke with Dr. Albert Vernon of Oxford, archaeologist who has worked there. Told me of the "doorless chamber," now roofless as well, a strange room originally in cellar of fortress, dating back to about the time of the engraved Zodiac. Vernon calls it "the black room." Bas-relief sculptures of enormous snakes on all walls, still bearing traces of black paint._

 _Vernon on "Cult of Ten": "Like the vampire legends, this one tells of supernatural creatures with deadly powers. The Masters, war-leaders and nobles who evidently worshiped the demon of the Zodiac, believed they could gain unlimited power if they could harness the energies of all ten symbols. This was never achieved, but legends tell of their creating armies of obedient soldiers by forcing men into the Black Room until somehow their wills were broken. They emerged conscienceless and cruel and willing to follow any order, even a suicidal one, to serve their masters. Power of the Cult was broken around the year 1526."_

 _Vernon also added this information: Natives in the area claim the cult is not dead. As recently as the 1950s they reported a circle of robed men chanting atop a bare rocky hill on May 1 each year. One witness says they were surrounded "by blue flames" when they chanted. Reminiscent of Bill's flaming hands when he "makes a deal."_

 _Q: Any evidence of modern-day Cult worshipers?_

 _Vernon: "Strange that you should ask. In 2002 I met an Englishman who claimed he had gained enlightenment at the old castle. Young man, in his twenties. I cannot recall his name, but he was from Yorkshire. Met him on an airplane trip back to London from Budapest. He clutched an ancient book or manuscript and kept caressing it through the whole flight. He struck me as unstable."_

 _Vernon also gave me the tantalizing hint that in the 1990s an obscure British rock band took the Zodiac symbol, though slightly different from the one in GF, for one of their album covers. One of the musicians in that group later showed up in San Francisco and was, I believe, the drummer for the Scream Once and Die band. Can't find any mention of him post-1996._

 _NB: The 900 AD Zodiac is also different from either modern one. Symbols:_

 _1\. Fir tree_

 _2\. Glacier_

 _3\. Comet_

 _4\. Human eyes_

 _5\. Fish_

 _6\. Pentagram_

 _7\. Heart_

 _8\. Ram_

 _9\. Cat with curved tail_

 _10\. Six-fingered human hand_

 _NB: Glacier is obviously ice. Comet=shooting star? Eyes=spectacles. Ram=llama? Cat=question mark?_

 _Speculation: though symbols differ, they represent people of different temperaments, as did the GF version. Same rough grouping of ten temperaments, I think. Have seen other variants (Native American et al.)_

 _Possible suspects: Man on plane with book. Musician._

* * *

"Huh," Mabel said. "So, there could be a connection somehow between the British musician guy and Spikeface's band. Sounds suspicious to me."

"Yeah," Wendy said. "First, I thought it was obviously the German guy, but now I'm not so sure."

"Well," Dipper said, "if we can track down Trish Razor, she might be able to help us find the drummer."

"Brobro, that's a big _if,"_ Mabel said.

Dipper stacked up all the pages again and replaced them in the envelope. "OK, if it's Bill Cipher, then he's right here already. Sort of. But my gut feeling really is that it's not him. He's hard to pin down, but—well, we have a sort of connection, and I think I'd sense it if he was lying, and especially if he was behind this."

"Dude," Wendy said, sounding upset, "if the guy who made the CD case is off in Germany or England or South America, that's one thing. But if it's some drummer living in San Francisco, that's way too close to you guys for comfort."

"Yeah," Mabel said. "When's Ford coming back, now?"

"I told you, Saturday evening or Saturday night. But I'll phone him. I'll ask him if he can stop over in California and come and see our new house. I'm sure he won't mind."

"I think I know why," Wendy said.

"I know you do," Dipper told her. "I'll ask him to do that cleansing ritual. Just in case. And here, too, and in your house before your dad comes home."

Wendy took his hand. _Want you to be real careful, Dip._

— _I will be, Lumberjack Girl. We all will be._

"Aw, man," Mabel complained. "Mental voodoo! I wish I could do that."

Dipper thought of how uneasy he felt, having a few molecules of Bill Cipher inside him. How terrifying his and Wendy's encounter with a Nymph had been after Wendy's nearly-disastrous wish that first gave them this gift and then nearly drove them both insane. True, now that he and Wendy had this connection, he would never in a million years give it up—but when he thought of all they had been through to get it, he shook his head. "No, Sis," he said. "You really don't."


	23. Chapter 23

**23: A Little Down Time**

* * *

After they had sat on the floor for nearly an hour, discussing what they had read and learned, trying to come up with something to do, somewhere to go, from there, Mabel continued to wish she had the same kind of ability that Wendy and Dipper had.

"OK, girl," Wendy said when their discussion had fizzled. "If you're so curious, let's try it out. I don't think it's gonna work, but give me your hand. Dipper, take both our hands."

"One-third of the Zodiac," Dipper said, but he swiveled so they were all sitting in a triangle, knee to knee, and then leaned forward to hold his sister's and his girl's hands.

 _Dip, you there? Testing, one, two, three._

— _Four, five, six. Gotcha, Lumberjack Girl._

 _Cool! OK, Mabes? You getting any of this?_

Nothing happened. Dipper said aloud, "Close your eyes and just let your mind drift, Mabel. Relax. Clear everything. Listen with your mind, not your ears."

"Um, OK. Brain ears turned on," Mabel murmured.

"Good. Relax, relax. Hold on, not tight, just like you're casually holding hands with Teek, OK? Not that tight! That's better. Breathe slowly. Yeah, that's right."

Before she could begin to snore, Dipper thought: _—Hey, Mabel? You getting this, Sis?_

Nothing, but Wendy chimed in: _I'm getting it, Dip. Mabel? You there, girl? Squeeze our hands if any of this is coming through._

Mabel's grip did not tighten.

— _Strange that it won't work at all. She and I are twins. Two people can't get much closer than that._

 _Hmm. Let me try something, Dip. Don't get all worked up or anything. Focus in on my feelings._

Wendy conjured up a scene in her imagination: she was hugging Dipper tight against her, and they were kissing passionately, tongues touching.

Dipper caught his breath.

Mabel said, "Wa-wa-wow!" Her eyes blipped open. "What, I thought you guys were _kissing!"_

"Just _thinking_ about it, Mabes," Wendy said, as Dipper dropped Mabel's hand as if it had become a hot potato crawling with pissed-off black widow spiders.

"So—that's what you guys _do_?" Mabel asked, raising one eyebrow and half-closing the other eye. "Make out mentally? That is so awesome!"

"No! No," Dipper said. "We can hear each other's thoughts. You know, have conversations."

"Intellectual conversations," Wendy put in with a mischievous grin. "About stimulation and response, fluid production, that kind of scientific biz."

Dipper turned a bright pink.

"Huh," Mabel said as Wendy let go of her hand. "So . . . I miss out on the words, but I kinda caught the feels. Let's see if you and me can do that, Brobro!" She grabbed both of Dipper's hands. "Now what am I thinking about?"

"Kissing Mermando," Dipper said. "While popping your foot and thinking of negative eight."

Mabel gasped. "Oh, my God! You're good, Dipper!"

"No, that was a guess because I know you so well. I didn't really get anything."

"Do me! Think of something exciting! Send me some strong emo, Bro!"

Not wanting to think of kissing Wendy, Dipper closed his eyes and thought up something that should really come through if anything could: Him and Mabel, clutched in the grip of the gigantically swollen Bill Cipher in the Fearamid as he proposed to kill one of them just for fun. Mabel flinched as Dipper tried to cover her, to protect her. The terrifying giant Bill rumbled, "Eeny, meeny, minie, YOU!"

"Um . . . you're rubbing suntan lotion on Wendy's legs? No, no, wait! You're taking a picture of her in body paint! Um, no. Oh, I got it! You're giving her a foot massage!"

Dipper let go of her hands. "Sorry, Sis."

"Mabel," Wendy said, sounding troubled, "that photo was a big mistake. Tambry sent it as a joke. How it happened, well, me and her were fooling around a year ago and did that. Nobody else was with us, we washed the stuff off right after we took pics of each other, and I never meant anybody to see the dumb photo. Should've erased it. Thought I had."

"Sorry," Mabel murmured. "Touched a nerve. But, after all the excitement of the last couple days, and after all this Mystery Twin brain exercising, and coming to think of it—How about foot rubs all around, Dip?"

He frowned and shook his head.

"Oh, come on, Broseph! I could really use one! And Wendy liked it when you gave her one back in the summer! Please?"

"Only if you'll do mine," Dipper said. "Seriously, Mom asks for them, you ask for them, and I always do them for you and nobody ever asks if I'd like one."

"Yeah, yeah, cry me a big old river," Mabel said with a grin. "But, OK, since it's holiday time and it's just this one time, I'll promise to give rub for rub. Whattaya say, Brofessor? Make me feel a lot more relaxed."

"Me, too, man," Wendy said. "Before you did my feet that time after Woodstick, I never knew how, um, sensual a foot massage could be! Wait, I meant 'sensational.'" However, her smile said otherwise.

"OK, OK," Dipper said with a sigh. "But let's at least wash our feet first. Especially you, Mabel!"

They did, in the upstairs bathroom, the girls together, sitting on the edge of the tub, and then Dipper, who secretly doubted Mabel would really reciprocate. She'd probably be too relaxed.

"Who goes first?" he asked.

"Me, me!" Mabel said, throwing herself back on Dipper's bed, raising her feet and wiggling her toes in anticipation.

Dipper spread a towel on the bed, she happily adjusted her position, and he rubbed some scented oil—peppermint hand lotion, which Mabel had packed—onto his palms and then started to work.

"I never noticed how similar your and Dipper's feet are!" Wendy said, sitting beside Mabel to watch Dipper's work.

"Twin toes, girl!" Mabel said. "Mmm, yeah! I _love_ it when he presses in behind my big toe. Stretch my toes, Dip! Stretch 'em, I say! I wanna feel the joints pop!"

Dipper did as she asked, resignedly, though he was doing his usual attentive job. Toward the end, Mabel was practically purring. "Nothing like it!" she said as he finished. "After one of these, I always go right to sleep. So relaxing!"

"OK, my turn," Wendy said as Dipper finished. "Scoot over, Mabes!"

It wasn't a double bed, but it was wide enough for two. Dipper wiped his hands on a towel first, then re-applied the hand lotion, let Wendy rest her heels on his knee, and began to rub the pepperminty hand cream onto her pale, smooth skin.

 _Mm! Be careful, Dip. You know how peppermint gets my motor running!_

 _-Oh, gosh, I didn't think! Wait, I believe there's some coconut-scented stuff downstairs—_

 _Uh-uh. Just keep doin' what you're doin'. Oh, yeah, man! I wonder if actual, you know, love-making, is as good as this is!_

— _It better be!_

Mabel had swung around so she could watch. "Wendy, you have elegant feet!"

That made Wendy giggle. "Thanks, man."

"No, really pretty. They're so long and shapely, and I love your toes!"

"You wouldn't think that if you had 'em and stubbed 'em on a tree stump!"

"Well, my _toes_ are stumpy. Yours are so graceful-looking!"

Then, as Dipper rubbed the ball of her right foot, right behind the toes, he felt Wendy convulsively arch her back, and suddenly she bent her toes down to briefly grab his hand, gasping as she did. _Oh, God!_

— _Wendy, did you just, uh—?_

 _Mm! Dip, I suddenly felt REAL GOOD! Maybe tell you about it when we're alone._

"Did I hurt you?" Dipper asked aloud, to cover his momentary pause in the massage.

"No, my foot's a little tender in there, you know," Wendy said, her voice a little breathy. "Feels good, though."

Mabel apparently hadn't caught on to what Dipper suspected had just happened. "Yeah, at first those thumb presses are sort of painful, but then the tension lets go."

"Oh, it feels _great_ when the tension lets go!" Wendy agreed.

Dipper went on and finished her massage. "My turn," he said.

"Aw, Dip, later," Mabel said. "I'm too chilled out now!"

"I'll do it for you, Dip," Wendy said.

Perhaps shamed by Wendy's offer, Mabel gave in, and she massaged Dipper's left foot while Wendy did the right. He sent Wendy warning messages— _Don't get me, you know, all stirred up. Lying back like this, I couldn't hide it, and I'd never hear the end of it from Mabel._

 _Gotcha Dip. Just a light rubdown. How's Mabes doing?_

— _Feels a little like the time Waddles came over and licked the bottom of my foot in the middle of the night. Not exciting. She doesn't know what she's doing._

 _Hang onto that, man! I'll make this up to you before you go back to Piedmont. When we're alone, I'll give you the real thing. You can shoot me all you know about massage, all your skills, and I'll give you one to remember!_

Five minutes later Dipper said, "That's enough. It feels great." However, he knew he'd made them feel much better than he did. Especially Wendy!

"Mm," Mabel said, stretching her arms and yawning. "Now all I want is to sack out for a nap. How about you guys?"

"That sounds great," Wendy said. "Man, I can't remember the last time I had a nice nap in the middle of the day. It'd be a real treat."

Mabel sat up. "I think you and me can fit on my bed. Dip won't mind being alone in his."

"No, that's fine," Dipper told her. "You girls catch a little sleep, and I'll try to relax and think about the case."

"We got a case!" Mabel crowed. "Mystery Twins!" She spun to face Dipper, and they did the silly fist-bump and the even sillier "Blip! Blap! Bloopity-bloop! Twins! Phlbbbt!" ritual they had started in kindergarten and hadn't performed since they were what, twelve?

Wendy laughed. "OK, OK. Cuteness overload! Hey, Mabel, is there, like, a blanket?"

Mabel got a bright red one, and then she and Wendy lay side by side on Mabel's bed, sharing the pillow. "Sorry about the smell," Mabel said. "Waddles used to sleep against the wall, and it kind of lingers."

"Smells fine to me," Wendy said, getting up on her elbow. "Heads down!" She tossed her fur hat across and onto the table, where it landed with a soft _plop_.

Dipper didn't lie down right away, but sat on his bed with his back against the wall and smiled at the friendship between Mabel and Wendy and at the feeling he had, down inside, that, come what may, the three of them would never drift away from each other.

Then he, too, lay back—without a blanket, because he liked the cool air—and sighed. He'd never in a million years be able to . . . um, able . . . um . . . .

Before he knew it, he was asleep.

* * *

They all woke up around three P.M. Dipper felt refreshed, and the girls looked relaxed. They kept complimenting Dipper. "I keep _telling_ him," Mabel said, "if he'd forget college and go to Hollywood, he could make a bajillion dollars! Dipper could become foot-massager to the stars!"

"What's the point?" Dipper asked. "You don't win Academy Awards for that."

"Bad idea, Mabes," Wendy agreed. "I wouldn't want my boyfriend to be holding feet with all those trashy starlets."

" _Boyfriend_?" Mabel, whose internal romance radar was laser-focused. "BOYfriend?" She clapped her hands to her cheeks. "Eeeee! Is it official?"

"Not for public consumption!" Dipper said. "Not for Dad and especially not for Mom. Not yet. But—yeah. Wendy's my girlfriend and I'm her boyfriend."

"Ooh, you guys!" Mabel insisted on hugging them both at the same time. "Oh, hey, look at the time! Teek's taking me to the movies at five! Um—but he can't drive me yet, so, um, I wonder—"

"I'll run you two over to the mall," Wendy said. "And then phone me when you want me to come and pick you up."

This time Mabel hugged just Wendy. "You're the best! Gotta get dolled up. Um—what's good to wear to a Hobbit movie?"

"Oh, boo!" Dipper said. "The last one's playing! I forgot. You know I wanted to see that with you!"

"Sorry, Bro!" Mabel said. "But Teek really wants to see it. Um. Maybe I could go again to see it with you in Piedmont?"

Breaking the minor standoff, Wendy asked, "Wanna double date?"

"Eeeee!" Mabel squeed again. She grabbed Dipper's arm and shook it. "Say yes, Brobro!"

"Love to," Dipper said. "Uh—you really want to see it, Wendy? You know, it's a _good_ movie, not like the ones we usually see on movie nights."

"Meh, I'll make an exception," she said, grinning and shrugging. She raised her eyebrows. "After all, it's got that hot elf in it!"

"Yum!" Mabel said. "Now, _him_ I'd like to give a foot massage! And maybe not stop at the feet, you know what I mean? Nyuk-nyuk! Yeah, you know!"

"Mabel!" Dipper yelped, but he was laughing.

Mabel thundered down to her room to get ready. Wendy came and sat beside Dipper. He put his arm around her waist. "Our first, um, real official date?"

She rubbed his back. "Yeah, first public official date, man! It's gonna be a new year soon. Might as well start off with something new, right?"

"You won't, you know, feel funny?"

"Me? Nah. Now, when you pressed down on the sole of my foot and the tingles shot all the way up, and I mean _all_ the way— _that_ made me feel funny! Real, real good, but funny!"

"Kind of startled me the way you curled your toes down so hard," Dipper said. "I didn't know if that meant I'd hurt you."

"You don't know about that?" Wendy asked. "It's involuntary, or it is with me, anyhow. At certain, um, moments, I can't keep from clenching my toes."

"Certain moments? Uh, you, uh mean—" Dipper felt his heart start to race. "Did, um you—did you really?"

She kissed him. "I really did, and it was great. Man, we are gonna be so good together!"

Dipper coughed self-consciously. Hoarsely, he said, "Um. You know, um, Mabel and Teek will probably want to sit, sort of, you know, apart from us in the theater. For—for privacy and, um—"

"You and I will sit in the back row," Wendy said softly. "Nice dark spot off the right aisle, toward the wall. We'll show up early just to make sure we get it."

Dipper felt as though his whole body was quivering. "Oh, OK. Um. Will, will we have a good, um, view of the screen, you know, from there?"

She playfully nibbled his ear. "Dude," she whispered, "who cares?"


	24. Chapter 24

**24: All Roads Lead to Nowhere**

* * *

 **(December 29-31, 2014)**

It would be great to report the big breakthrough Dipper and Mabel discovered that Monday night, leading to a neutralization of an extremely evil foe by New Year's Eve—the epic battle, the desperate struggle, the last-minute save, Wendy's courage, Dipper's brainy inspiration, Mabel's compassion that caused the villain to relent, repent, and go in peace.

Oh, yeah.

Except none of that happened. The Mystery Twins did go to Wendy's house to help her make it friendlier for Manly Dan. Though more snow was coming down, Wendy bought a load of sodium-free snow melt—it contained a mix of magnesium chloride, potassium chloride, and calcium chloride. They mixed each bag with a couple of pounds of alfalfa meal—it was sold as a fertilizer—and spread that down the driveway and in front of the porch.

"Not salt?" Mabel asked. She had started to taste it, but luckily Dipper was quick to warn her that just a smidgen of it would make her lose her cuteness.

"No sodium-type salt," Wendy said firmly. "It kills plants. This stuff doesn't do that, and it's harmless to animals, too. It'll melt the snow—might have to re-do it the night before Dad comes home, though, so I'll store half the bags out on the back porch."

"Why the alfalfa meal?" Dipper asked. It had given the whole driveway a faint greenish hue.

"Two reasons, Dip. First, the melt chemicals are white, so if you toss 'em on top of snow, you can't see where you've treated. Second, the stuff gives you traction."

They did a run-through and clean-up inside—though nothing was dirty, just a little dusty—and Wendy checked out all the lights and the heating system. Everything worked. "Help me move the love seat and the sofa," she said. "Right now, the space between them's too narrow for Dad and his crutches. He'll need more of an alley between them, so he can sit down to watch TV."

They made one or two other furniture adjustments. Then Wendy went out to her car and brought in some other stuff they'd bought at the hardware store when picking up the snow melt. "Want to help me with a little rough carpentry?" she asked Dipper.

"Sure," he said. If she'd asked him to saw his own leg off, he would probably have agreed.

But, no, he just had to hold the shower grab bar level (Wendy even had a laser level to help, which she got from her dad's big toolbox) while Wendy marked spaces to drill screw holes for mounting it. "Most people," she said, "would have to find a stud for this. But the walls here are mostly solid wood, so no sweat."

"How do you find a stud?" Mabel asked.

"Don't go there," Dipper warned Wendy. "She's heading for a bad pun."

Wendy drilled the holes and then held the bar in place while Dipper set and tightened the extra-long screws. "Will that hold?" he asked.

Wendy tugged hard at the bar. "Yeah, unless Dad gets mad and rips it out of the wall. Which he could do. Saw him punch out a tree one time."

"Lucky you have a shower stall and not just a tub," Dipper said.

"Yeah, I guess. Gotta admit, though, I like the upstairs bathroom at the Shack. Nothing like stretching out in a nice warm bath!"

"See," Mabel said, "a stud is a vertical wood frame element in a wall. So how do you find them?"

"You can tap on the wall and listen to the difference between the hollow sound where there's no wood and the more solid chunk where the stud is," Wendy said. "Or there's an infrared viewer you can use. The studs show up in a brighter color on the screen than the spaces between them. Also, you can get these cheap magnetic finders. They'll show where nails are, and you can trace the stud from that. The other kind of stud, I dunno, hang around guy's gyms, I guess?"

"You take all the fun out of it," Mabel muttered, but she was smiling.

By the time they left, the snow on the drive and in front of the porch had already sunk a couple of inches below the untreated part on the edges.

* * *

 **From the Journals of Dipper Pines, Decrypted from his Vigenere Cipher #7:**

 _. . . . Now the next part I'm going to use code for. I know Mabel can't resist peeking into my Journals, but so far, she's been unable to grasp the principles of codebreaking._

 _Anyway, long story short, I loved the date Wendy and I had! But I think I'm going to have to go see the movie again with Mabel, because there are parts of it I don't even remember. Not that Wendy and I were being, let's say naughty. We were just sitting there in the back corner of the theater (Wendy says the local kids call it the Passion Pit), me with my arm around her shoulders._

 _The movie seats were the kind with the armrests that swing back, and we'd moved the one between us out of the way, so we could sit very close together. We kept "talking" with our telepathy. It wasn't MST3K or anything, but we know we're going to have to say goodbye soon until next June, five whole months apart, and there's so much we want to tell each other while we're here, together, and not by Skyping or texting._

 _She wants me to bring my anomaly detector over to her house on New Year's Day. Everyone else will probably sleep late, but she and I will get up for our run. I'm pretty sure there's no paranormal activity there any longer, but she's right. It won't hurt to check._

 _And she wants to do some more preparation. Take over some canned goods and stuff she's bought to stock the pantry for Junior. Change the beds, put fresh sheets and stuff on, and so forth._

 _But, well, she wants to sort of explore why a foot massage makes her feel so special. So, I'll take over the lotion. But she warned me, "You know we have to be real careful. This is going to be a temptation to do more than we're ready for. Hope you can resist."_

 _"I can," I promised her._

 _"Hope I can!"_

 _Oh, man! Got to keep busy. Got to think about something else for the next couple of days!_

* * *

During those days, Dipper spent a good many hours on the computer. He and Mabel also made some calls—one to a museum of rock and roll in Los Angeles, one to a guy in Big Sur who'd written a history of the punk rock scene, and a couple to newspaper offices. Nobody they got in touch with seemed to know what had become of Trish Razor, AKA Susan Flowers. Or of Corpse Melon (Carl Debbinzer) or Snort Fangs (Samuel Kreplin).

They did get a couple of skimpy anecdotes from Blake Mersberg, the author of the punk history: "Oh, man, those dudes all dropped out of sight _years_ ago. I know that Larry Blurchard passed away. He married Suzy, and they got kinda square jobs, you know, writing and performing sound tracks for bad movies. I think Suzy kinda burned out bad. I saw her a few times after the band broke up, and she must've, well, let's say substance abuse of some kind is suspected and just leave it at that. Too bad. I liked her there for a couple years. Funny, pretty girl, talented. But she was like a zombie later on, except when she was on stage."

Kreplin hadn't been part of the music scene since the group fell apart in 1992. "Can't help you there, either. I think he dropped out of performing and took a job with, like, a hardware store? Can't remember. Clerking or something. No, wait. Big-box store, that was it. A House Junction store, I think, maybe on down toward San Diego, but I heard that before 2000, so God knows where he might be now. Debbinzer, I wouldn't look him up on a bet. He was _weird_ , man. I suspect he got Susan hooked on booze or something worse."

He promised he'd try to think of anybody who _might_ have had more recent contact with any of the band members, but he said, "I wouldn't hold my breath. You know how it is. These guys weren't even one-hit wonders, but they did have a couple-three good tracks. Had potential, you know, but never realized it."

He took Dipper's email address and agreed to alert him if anything came up or if he remembered more details. Dipper asked where he could get a copy of the book, and Mersberg, sounding flattered, said, "Oh, order it online. Hardcover's out of print, but you can get the paperback or the ebook. I think I probably mention Scream Once and Die in the 'Bay Area Scene' chapter, but there's not much on the group. See, they just never made that much of an impact."

Dipper was about to say goodbye, but Mabel took his phone from him and said, "Hi, Mabel Pines here, big fan. Listen, I'm helping with the research and I was wondering, was this group into stuff like occultism? Paranormal, you know? Huh. Yeah, right? Hmm. Yeah . . . yeah. OK, well, thanks! Anything else, Dip?"

Dipper took the phone back, thanked Mersberg, and punched the END button. "What was that about?"

"Doy! This T'Klamamamaramalamajama thingie's paranormal, no? Well, I thought to ask!"

"What did he say?"

"Um, 'There are always nuts in this business that fool around with that. I don't know. Maybe.'"

"Big lead, Mabel," Dipper said. Then he smiled. "But thanks. I'm glad you thought of it." The snow made running in the mornings hard, but the county kept the roads scraped, and Wendy drove them over to the high school—wonder of wonders, it had a sheltered track, so snow wasn't a problem. Of course, Dipper wondered if the canopy covering was going to hold up to the weight of the snow that had been piling up, but Wendy said it had lasted for a couple of winters.

Now, the cold, that was a bit of a problem. It was OK, though, in their sweats. They soon warmed up and by the third lap they could take the low temperature. The other annoyance was that they ran round and round and round again, over and over, twelve laps in forty-odd minutes.

"Bor-ing!" Wendy said after they'd finished one morning. "I like free-range running a lot better than this."

"Well, it helps us keep in shape," Dipper said. "The track team's going into high gear as soon as school starts again. The season begins early in February."

"Yeah, and I guess snow's not gonna be a hindrance down in sunny California. Keep me posted on how you do," Wendy said.

"You know I will." As he thought about Wendy's request that he re-check the Corduroy house to make sure nothing ghostly still lurked there, Dipper began to be concerned about something else.

As a result, Dipper called Ford—who fortunately had sprung for international phone coverage, since he and Lorena were in Paris—at eight on Tuesday morning. He had checked, and that meant that in Paris, it was four in the afternoon.

To his relief, Ford took him seriously. "Of course, we can do that," he said. "I'll work out an itinerary. We can change our flight plans. I've got Lorena's laptop running, so let me see."

Dipper heard the clicking and clacking of keys for a few moments, and then Ford said, "All right. As it is, we already have a layover in San Francisco, in fact, so we'll be close. Let me see . . . yes, I can do this. Hmm. Plenty of seats, but a later flight. How about this? Lorena and I will extend our honeymoon a little. She's been wanting to see the British Museum, so we'll spend a couple of days in London. Then, let me see . . . yes. We can land in San Francisco in the afternoon of January sixth, run out to visit your new house, I can do the cleansing, that should take about half an hour, and . . . hm. We won't be able to fly to Portland until the next day, but that's all right. Lorena has some accumulated vacation time."

"It would mean a lot to us," Dipper said.

"It's a wise precaution, Mason. Let me see . . . I'll phone ahead and tell your father that blessing a new house is an old family tradition and make a sort of joke out of it. I saw how he values traditions, so that should be our key. I'll call him tonight—wait, what time is it there? Eight? In the morning? Yes, of course it is. Remind me to tell you some time of the dimension I once found myself in where the time zones were only two feet wide! Anyway, I'll talk to Alexander and see if we can swing by for a couple of hours."

"A couple of hours? No, stay the night," Dipper suggested. "There's a really nice guest room down on the first floor. Mom would be thrilled. Uh, if you give her this much notice."

"Well—I may let your father invite us, if he thinks of it. I'd never intrude."

"Thanks, Grunkle Ford."

They chatted a little more, and Dipper assured him that otherwise, everything was going fine. Ford was glad to hear that Dan was due home soon, and he approved of the precautions Wendy was taking with the house, both in rechecking it and in making physical accommodations. "Dan's a stubborn fellow," Ford said with a chuckle. "But he loves his daughter, and since she's the one who's made the house safer, he'll be happy."

The second they were off the phone, Dipper called his dad.

"Mason! I'm on my way into the office!"

Dipper could hear road noises. "Should I call back?"

"No, got you on speaker. What's up, son?"

"Listen, Dad, I just found out that Grunkle Ford has an overnight layover in San Francisco when they fly back from Europe. Could he and Lorena spend the night in our new house instead of staying in a hotel?"

Alex Pines sounded delighted: "Absolutely! Wait, what night? Not tonight, is it?"

"No, no, it'll be, uh, Tuesday, the sixth of January."

"That's fine! Wanda will have time to make out her checklist! We'll be happy, and I know you and Mabel will like to see them again!"

"I'll ask him to call you to set it up," Dipper said. "Be sure to invite him—he's very shy about things like that, so you make the move and ask them to stay over. Thanks, dad!"

"They're family, Mason," his father said warmly. "Our door is always open for them."

* * *

Dipper made his own checklist. He'd scoured the Web for information about the monstrous T'klatlumodh, but he found barely a mention of it here and there. Grunkle Ford had gleaned about all there was available.

Frustration tugged at Dipper. Back home—well, packed in boxes, but he knew which boxes—he had amassed a small library of occult and paranormal literature, many of the books genuine antiques. Some of them might be helpful—when he could get home and consult them.

He'd have to pore through the indexes and see if he could locate any more information—more than Ford had managed to research in the hectic days before his wedding.

Still, as New Year's Eve came on, he had to admit he felt stymied. Bits and pieces, that was all they'd found.

What would the Ghost Harassers do?

Well—probably they'd get an hour-long episode (which, subtracting commercials, worked out to 43 minutes) from the idea. Dipper thought that it would be one of the weak entries, though. He could just imagine it.

* * *

Jackson Halls and Grunt Wilton, the stars, would introduce the idea:

 _Jackson: What is the T'klatlumodh? Is it truly an intruder from the world of spirits and paranormal monsters—or just a crazy old legend?_

 _Grunt: Jack and I set out to discover the truth behind a shocking and terrifying story. A story of a monstrous relic that can fill a house with ghostly snakes._

 _Jackson: And these snakes—they say—can drain the life from victims._

 _Grunt: Drain their souls!_

 _Jackson: Join us as we bring this legend to life._

 _Grunt: We're the Ghost Harassers!_

* * *

However, Dipper had watched every episode so far of the show. He suspected that because there just wasn't any information about this supernatural beastie, the episode would be one of those annoying, endlessly-recapped ones. After every commercial break:

* * *

 _Grunt: Ancient legends say the T'klatlumodh was used as an instrument of torture in this forgotten underground cell of a Hungarian castle._

 _Jackson: (as he flashes an eerie green light over the walls): Grunt! Found something!_

 _Grunt: What is it, Jack?_

 _Jackson: SNAKES!_

 _ **Cut to commercial. Then:**_

 _Announcer: Jack and Grunt have traveled to Hungary, where a ruined castle may hold the vital clue to the true nature of the dread T'klatlumodh. Jack has just made a startling discovery!_

 _Jackson: SNAKES!_

And then ten minutes of Grunt and Jackson showing the bas-relief sculptures of snakes around the walls. Then—

 _Grunt: Oh, no! Oh, no! (BREATHING HARD) Jack! Jack! I've just made a horrifying discovery!_

 _ **Cut to commercial. Then:**_

 _Announcer: In a remote part of Hungary, in an ancient ruined fortress where legends speak of devils and demons and possession, Grunt and Jack have come to learn the truth about the T'klatlumodh, a paranormal being said to be able to corrupt and tear the soul right out of human beings! Jack has discovered an important clue: effigies of the T'klatlumodh's usual manifestation as a deadly serpent. But then Grunt has a startling find of his own!_

 _Grunt: Jack—there are no doors in this room! If we hadn't climbed in through the missing roof—we'd have no way out!_

 _Jackson: That is—I'm feeling so—do you feel it?_

 _Grunt: Yeah! This is so freaking—there's a feeling, there's a feeling—_

 _Jackson: I know, right?_

* * *

And so it would go, right up to the last minute, when the two would admit, "Well, we didn't actually manage to film the T'klatlumodh, but one thing's for sure—there's something very weird about the whole idea. Join us next week. We're the Ghost Harassers!"

That was the kind of episode that Dipper hated.

* * *

The gang didn't have a real party on New Year's Eve, just a family gathering in the Shack. They ate a good meal, not as substantial a one as Abuelita would have prepared had she not gone back to Mexico for the winter, but a satisfying one.

They counted down the seconds, blew roll-up party blowers, and wished each other "Happy 2015!" Little Soos slumbered on without even waking up. Soos kissed Melody, Teek pecked Mabel on the cheek—or tried to, but crafty Mabel knew just when to twitch her head and give him a proper lip-lock smooch—and Soos laughed. "Aw, Dipper, Wendy, go on! New Year's, homies! We won't tell anybody, dawgs!"

So that was a thing, then. They didn't hug tightly, the way they did when they were alone and feeling affectionate, but held each other's hands, kissed—and on the lips, of course—and Wendy said, "Happy New Year, Dip."

"You too, Magic Girl. I hope it's the best one so far."

"Aw. Same back at you, dude."

That night the old year ran down, and the new one geared up.

Though Dipper had a lot to look forward to—hey, he'd written a book, and it was going to come out, and the editor was going to ask him for revisions in a week or so, and he was JV track team captain, and—best of all—he could now kiss his Lumberjack Girl right in front of everybody (as long as everybody consisted of his grunkles, the Ramirezes, Mabel, and Teek, anyhow), and they'd been on a date—so they were officially a couple!

And Wendy was waiting for him to give her another foot massage. And he had big plans, oh, yes, he did. He ought to feel happy.

But then—

Well, you know—

There was some sorcerer or wizard or something out there that had directly attacked Wendy.

And Dipper wouldn't be able to rest until they had tracked him down.

 _Don't let it be like a bad episode of_ Ghost Harassers! It wasn't quite a prayer, but it was more than a wish. _Let us Mystery Twins succeed where the Ghost Harassers wouldn't. Let us stop this thing—soon!_


	25. Chapter 25

**25: Into the New Year**

* * *

 **(January 1-4, 2015)**

"Well," Wendy said on Thursday morning, after Dipper had checked out her room and especially her closet (zero on the paranormal scale, when adjusted for the normal Gravity Falls background readings), and together they had hauled in the groceries, stocked the pantry, and had stripped the boys' beds and Dan's and put the sheets in to wash—Wendy said she'd take care of the comforters later, taking them into town to the Sudsy Washarette to wash and dry them in the big coin machines. "Well—just my bed now. So—the, uh, foot thing first?" She smiled expectantly

"Sure," Dipper told her. They were still in their running sweats. Wendy had advised Dipper to pack a change of clothes, and before leaving the Shack, he'd stuffed shirt, jeans, socks, and underwear in her workout bag.

Wendy kicked off shoes and pulled off socks and lay down on her bed, Dipper got a washcloth from the bathroom, ran hot water and wet it, and wiped her feet—they had worked up a sweat on the track—and then tenderly dried them with a heavy towel.

As he began to massage the peppermint-scented hand cream onto her skin, she sent him a thought: _Know why I wanted you to do this again, Dip?_

— _Because it feels good?_

 _Mm, well, there is that. But this thing about me getting a big O from what you're doing now—I wanna know if that's just some kink in me, or if it has something to do with this connection we've got._

— _I'd guess that it does._

 _What I want to do, as you massage my feet, is to send you, like, feedback, I guess? I'll try to send you my feelings, along with my thoughts. But let's not get carried away. I mean, if I start to moan and writhe and act like I'm ready for the big step, just back off, OK? Let me cool down?_

— _I'll try._

 _I trust you, Dipper._

He began to feel the waves of her sensations as he first rubbed her feet, then began on the pressure points: under the ankle, the arch, and then the thumb work toward the front of her soles. He gave her toes attention and felt his breath getting fast and shallow in sympathy with hers. He swallowed hard and asked hoarsely, "Is this doing it?"

 _Mm-hmm. Don't stop. Or are you getting too—_

— _I'm OK. Uh, I'll send you back what I'm feeling, too, so we can both, uh, be—you know, on guard._

 _Right. OK. go ahead, dude._

But try though he did, as their feelings resonated with each other, his own excitement mounted until he couldn't quite keep the fantasies out of his mind—imagining not just her bare feet, but her bare, well, her bare _her._ And touching her here and there.

 _Dipper, you're getting turned on!_

— _Can't help it. I'll stop._

 _No, no, don't, not now! I'm nearly there. Do that thing with your thumbs!_

Caressing her left foot, Dipper put both of his thumbs together on the fleshy ball just behind her big toe and pushed hard, then pressed upward, thumb tips gliding over her lotion-slippery skin and toward the toe.

Wendy jerked and yipped, "Aw, yeah!" Her toes clenched hard.

And Dipper himself felt the sharp, short spasm, and then it hit him, too—

— _Uh-oh!_

Wendy gasped _. Dipper, I'm feeling something real strong from you!_

She shook and cried, "Oh! Oh! Mmm!" and Dipper realized that what had happened to him had also happened to her, but in a different way.

And then she thought: _Oh, man! Dipper, are you—did you just now—?_

Panting, he confessed out loud, "Uh, yeah, I—I did. Sorry, sorry."

She moved over and patted the bed beside her. "It's OK. It's OK. We didn't undress or anything. We didn't even touch, you know, in any intimate way to make us—but now hold me, let me come back down. Just be here with me . . . just hold me."

They lay cuddling, their heart rates returning to normal. "Man," Dipper said. "That was way more—it felt so different—don't take this the wrong way—"

She was shaking with giggles. He suspected she didn't trust her voice when she thought, _It felt AWESOME, Dip! Guess now we each know how the other half lives! It's different for boys and girls, isn't it? And the foot thing is different from what I've felt before when I've, well, you know, brought it on myself. Or when you, I guess, triggered my big one there. All of them are awesome, though! Whoo!_

"Are we good?" Dipper asked her.

"Are we ever!" She put her hand on his cheek, pulled him close, and they kissed. _Wait until we do it for real, man! We'll, like, blow the windows out of the walls!_

— _I don't think anybody else in the history of the world has ever felt this way. Uh, sorry, but I'm kind of—I mean, I, uh, need—could I borrow your shower?_

 _I need a shower, too. We could both—no, down, girl! Whoa, whoa, we made our pact. OK, we'll take turns and shower one at a time. You go first. I think you need it more than me._

— _I may make it a cold one!_

He reached the door, but Wendy, sitting up on the edge of her bed, her face still flushed, said in a shaky voice, "Uh, Dip? The work-out bag with your clothes in it is beside the foot of the bed. Better, you know, take your stuff into the bathroom with you."

"Uh." He went back and fished out his clothing. "Thanks. I won't be long."

She blushed furiously, despite her grin. "Well, I think—"

"That _wasn't_ a pun!" he said hastily, and before his tongue could land him in worse trouble, he went to the Corduroy house's one bathroom—Manly Dan, like a good many contractors, improved everybody's house but his own—and stripped off his damp clothes before stepping under a steaming shower.

When he'd been ten, eleven, twelve, he'd hated showers—they were a waste of time. Why shower? You're just going to get dirty again. You're not fooling anybody. But there was also the fact that he'd hated the way his body looked, all noodly arms and legs, narrow hairless chest, and pooched belly.

Then he'd hit thirteen, and, like Grunkle Stan's book said, he found himself constantly sweaty (and awkward). And he'd joined the track team and slowly had built up his leg muscles as his stomach flattened and his arms had started to fill out, too, and he didn't want girls (meaning Wendy) to wrinkle their noses when he got close to them, so—

He'd learned to love showers. Hot ones. Long—um, make that _extended_ ones.

He cut this one short, though, five minutes tops. Then he toweled dry and got dressed, all but his socks. He walked barefoot back to the bedroom, carrying them. Wendy was lying down again, but she sat up as he came in. "Dipper," she said softly, "thanks for—for not pushing it, man. You could've talked me into anything at one point there, you know."

He grinned at her as he sat next to her. "Yeah, but you know me. There's nothing that I wanted more than that, but, well, we promised each other. And you might have noticed, I've got a little problem with guilt as it is."

"Yeah, you did the right thing," she said. "We did, I guess, together. Anyway, now we know that if the pressure gets too high, we have a socially acceptable way of lettin' off steam!"

"As long as nobody knows about it," he told her.

"Yep. I'll hop in the shower now. Get your shoes on and strip the bed, OK?"

"Sure."

At ten, Mabel called and asked where he was. "Helping Wendy with a few things," he told her. "We already had breakfast. Hang on." He held the phone away from his face. "Wendy, how long for the laundry?"

"Last sheets just went in the dryer. Ninety minutes."

"Mabel? Listen, we have to wait for the dryer to finish. We'll be back at the Shack by noon."

"OK. Think it's all right for me to call Teek? He went home last night at one. This morning, I guess I mean. I just now woke up, myself."

"I think he's probably up by now," Dipper said. "Hey, you two, be good!"

"Yeah, yeah. By the way, I noticed my peppermint lotion's missing, Brobro!"

"We did a run, and I gave Wendy another massage. Won't see her again for five months, you know!"

"That's fine, that's fine. You owe me another one now, though. And by the way—you two be good, too!"

Wendy had sat close enough to overhear. She grabbed Dipper's hand and turned the phone to speak into it. "Mabes, I swear we _are_ bein' good! But that doesn't mean we can't enjoy each other's company!"

"I'll take _your_ word for it," Mabel said. "Sir Dippingsauce's word—not so much!"

* * *

The next morning, Wendy and Dipper went to the laundromat and took care of washing and drying the heavy bedding, and Mabel came back to the Corduroy house with them to help make up the beds. "Guess the place is as good as it's gonna get before the boys come back and wreck it again," Wendy said when everything was done. She sighed. "So what time's your flight out of Portland on Sunday, guys?"

"Ten-thirty," Dipper said. "We won't get home until after four PM, though. Have to make a stop in Salt Lake City."

"That sucks," Wendy said.

Dipper shrugged. "Well—it was either that, or take a nonstop flight out at seven in the morning. This way we don't have to get up so early. Besides, it still beats an eighteen-hour bus ride!"

"I kinda miss the bus, though," Mabel said. "I put in a lot of high-quality sleeping time on the ol' Speedy Beaver!"

"OK," Wendy said. "Here's the schedule: We'll leave about seven in the morning—"

"Aw, come on!" Mabel groaned.

"—and Mabes can sleep in the car on the drive over. We should get to the airport in plenty of time. I'll see you guys off. Then I'll swing back through Morris, pick up my brothers, and we'll spend Sunday night in our house. That way I can roust the guys outa bed and get them off to school on Monday morning. Dad and Junior plan to haul in on Tuesday 'round two, three o'clock in the afternoon. I'll get back from high school, take care of getting them settled and then cook 'em something, and then I have to go for my first two night classes of the new college semester. From then on, remember I'll be sleeping in the attic of the Shack until Dad's well again, so if you need me and can't get me on my phone, call the Shack land line and Soos or Melody will take a message. You know, if I'm in class or whatever."

"Wendy," Mabel said, "you're making a listy thing! Don't go to the Dip side, Wendy! Don't do it!

A little later, Wendy asked if they'd like to go up to her aunt's farm, and since Mabel hadn't been, she enthusiastically said yes. "Let me change, then," Wendy said.

To Dipper's vast surprise, she came back from her room in a soft heather-green turtlenecked sweater-top—and a knee-length denim skirt, plus flats. No hat, not the trapper's hat or the pine-tree one. "Don't make fun," she warned. "Aunt Sallie specially asked me to wear something girly like this next time I came up, and this is all I have."

"You look great," Dipper said.

"Yeah, but strange," Mabel agreed. "Your legs are nice!"

"I don't have any panty hose," Wendy said. "But I don't guess I need 'em. Not horribly cold or anything."

"I'll knit you some leg warmers!" Mabel promised. "You'll have them by the end of next week!"

They drove the twenty miles up to Morris. Dan, hobbling around on crutches, but doing well at it, leaned against the doorjamb to hug Wendy. "You were so beautiful in the weddin'!" he said, sniffling. "And look at my baby girl now!"

"Yeah, yeah," Wendy said, turning pink. "Get back in the house and sit down before you fall down, Dad!"

Manly Dan winked over Wendy's shoulder at Dipper. "Takes after her aunt, this one does!"

Junior helped his dad turn around, steadying Dan as he manipulated the crutches. Junior said a gruff "hi" to Dipper and Mabel and then sat around like a lump for the next couple of hours, hardly speaking.

The cows and mule enchanted Mabel. She spent most of her time with them, or wandering around in the midst of the chicken flock—for some reason the Rhode Island Reds instantly imprinted on her and took her for their leader. And Mabel obliged: "Onward, my fowls! This way, my clucky, plucky minions!"

They clustered around her like a thick moving carpet of feathers, as if they all wanted to press close against her, and she paraded them back and forth in the back yard, an army of small, reddish-brown-feathered female soldiers. "Man," Wendy murmured, watching her through the kitchen window, "Look at that. She's got a gift with chickens."

Earlier, Sallie had chased the two younger Corduroy boys out of the house when they made fun of their sister's wearing a skirt. They were still grumpy and started chunking corn cobs at the flock, just to be mean. Mabel pointed at them and shouted, "Charge! Take no prisoners!" Sixteen seconds later, the boys ran in the back door, slammed it, and leaned against it. About fifty chicken beaks hammered in fury on the other side of the door.

Wild-eyed, one of the kids yelled, "Those chickens are crazy!"

"Serves you right," Aunt Sallie snapped at them. "That girl out there's worth the two of you put together! Chickens know who's got a good heart and who's just plain low-down ornery!"

They at least had the grace to look ashamed.

Sallie had cooked a hearty farmhouse lunch, featuring golden brown fried chicken—"Not mine!" she assured Mabel. "I never kill one of my own. This is from the supermarket." Since the dearly departed chickens—three of them, because of Dan's and Junior's appetites—were not friends of hers, Mabel chowed down on a couple of drumsticks. Aunt Sallie had also made a heaping bowl of smooth and buttery creamed potatoes, a wonderfully savory Brussels-sprout hash, piping hot yeast rolls, and two enormous home-baked apple pies, their gooey, cinnamony filling oozing through the lattice-crust tops.

"Lady," Mabel said as she worked on her second pie slice, "I like your style!"

"You two Pines twins," Sallie said gravely, "are cut out for extra-special lives. You mark my words! And whatever you do, don't ever lose that good heart of yours. The chickens know! The Shadow knows! And old Aunt Sallie, she knows, too! I've got the second sight."

"You're spookin' me, Sis," Dan complained, but he didn't stop eating.

That Saturday at mid-morning, Stan and Sheila returned home, full of high spirits and stories about New York and Atlantic City and how Stan lost money in the casinos every single day of their honeymoon, a little here, a little there—until the last visit, on which occasion he not only wiped out his losses but also recouped enough to more than pay for the honeymoon trip in precisely forty minutes of card play. In fact, he'd won spectacularly—the pot amounted to somewhat more than twice the whole expense of the trip!

He'd left behind a table full of high-rollers who'd mistakenly figured they'd found themselves an easy-to-milk rube. Now they just stared at him, their jaws dropped open, their eyes round, their stunned brains all wondering the same thing: "Wha' happen? How'd he do it?"

Or so Stan assured them. "I'll tell you the secret, though. It's nothin' but practical psychology, ya know? It's all in knowin' how to read people," he said, gesturing and accidentally shaking a spare ace of hearts from inside his coat sleeve.

Dipper and Mabel sat in the McGuckets' parlor and heard all the stories and admired all the photos. Sheila had never seen New York before, and the two of them had done the town, taking in Broadway shows, walking along Fifth Avenue and admiring the Christmas displays still up in the store windows, going to a concert, visiting the tourist sites, spotting celebrities, and, in general, being such a happy, loving couple that even hardened waiters from the Bronx smiled at them.

When Dipper mentioned going back to Piedmont the following morning, Stan immediately offered to drive the twins over to Portland, but Wendy said, "I got it, dude. You two need to rest up from your trip."

"Yeah," Stan said, with a meaningful glance at Sheila, who met his gaze with a Mona Lisa smile. "Rest. Bed rest, yeah. That's the ticket. Yeah."

And a little later Dipper got a call from Ford: his and Lorena's overnight stay at the Pines family's new house was all arranged, and he said he had rounded up the necessary requirements for his house-cleaning job. "I only hope," he said, "that we don't get any pesky questions going through Customs. But almost all of it will appear to be souvenirs, and the rest is small and inconspicuous, so I don't think there will be a problem."

And the rest of the day—well, Teek and Mabel had a date, and Dipper and Wendy just hung out. Time goes fast when you don't want it to. The two of them found some hours of together time on Saturday afternoon and evening, though fewer than they'd have liked.

They renewed their vows—or as Wendy called it, their pact. They firmly resolved they would both be good until Dipper turned eighteen. "It's getting more difficult," Dipper admitted. "But I swear I'll never try to push you into anything! Not until my eighteenth birthday."

"And when that time comes, all bets are off, man!" Wendy promised with a wicked smile. "But, man, I'm gonna miss you so crazy bad. I'll be waiting for you in June!"

And all too soon, Sunday morning came. They made the two hour-plus drive to the airport, with Mabel snoozing in the back seat and Dipper and Wendy touching enough to converse silently. Finally, before the twins went through Security and then off to their departure gate, Dipper and Wendy exchanged one last long, sweet, peppermint-flavored kiss goodbye.

At least goodbye for a while.

They went to the gate. Wendy sighed and walked out of the airport, a wistful smile on her face.

June would come, she told herself. June would come.

And feeling a shade more cheerful, she reclaimed her car from short-term parking and set off to go pick up her brothers.

Man. Five whole months.

But—

June would come.

* * *

 **Epilogue: The Witching Time (January 5/6, 2015)**

Hamlet said it, according to Will Shakespeare, who wrote it, like this: "'Tis now the very witching time of night, / When churchyards yawn and Hell itself breathes out / Contagion to this world."

Lots of people remember it as "witching hour," but they're wrong. Shakespeare definitely wrote "witching time" back in 1598 and left it to little Johnny Keats to change it in a poem addressed to his brother George in 1818: "'Tis the witching hour of night, / Orbed is the moon and bright."

That leads to the question: What _is_ the witching hour?

Many would vote for midnight, the lowest ebb of the tide of day. And it may be true that ghosts issue from their tombs at the last stroke of twelve (though there is no record of ghosts punching a clock as they report for duty), and witches, who, when they are able to do it, turn in for a good night's sleep about four in the afternoon, very probably set their alarms to shriek them awake about then. Witches do love to sleep late, but then doesn't everyone?

Take midnight as the witching hour then, that's fine with me.

Ah, but the witching TIME of night, that's different. That's not an hour you'd find on the face of any clock. It isn't when the dial of the old mantel timekeeper throws two hands straight up, as though praying heaven to come to the aid of the poor mortals victimized by those unholy supernatural creatures. No, the witching TIME is a span, a passage of minutes, or even hours, few or many. So, what did Hamlet mean? Midnight and a few minutes before and after, or—a passage of uneasy haunted hours?

I think it's the latter. Say, two to four in the morning. When living spirits are low and blood is sluggish, when the fears of the day cluster around and mock the poor soul who lies awake and anguished, that is the time for uncanny creatures to prey on cowering folks.

That's a bad time to be wakeful and alone in the dark, I think you'll agree. You wouldn't want to jaunt out from home at two in the morning for a two-hour stroll down to the local graveyard and back, all alone (or—ARE you?). Two to four o'clock in the morning—a witching time, a mourning time, a frightful time.

One thing is for sure: the individual we have come to know as the researcher considered that span of time ideal for the unhallowed act he planned.

He'd had to rest up for it and to prepare for it. His kind of enchantment meant no wave of a wand or slug of a potion; it was dawn-of-time, savage magic, barbaric magic, and it called for spilled blood. A great deal of this was furnished, unwillingly, by a former black sheep, now about 105 kilos of cooling mutton. Some of it, though had to come from the researcher's own veins, tainted human blood mingled with an innocent animal's, making it all corrupt.

The blood had been used, or part of it had been used, to paint an enormous pentagram on the dry earth just outside the cemetery. Ten feet across it measured, with cabalistic inscriptions inside the points of the star and a carefully written runic ward lettered around the edge of the circle widdershins, or rather between the inner and outer rims of the edge. Widdershins? That is counter-clockwise. Moving in the sinister direction, you understand. And the runes alone had taken him more than an hour to paint, because they had to be perfect.

One rune not properly done, or accidentally smeared, would spell disaster. Well, no, not really, you'd need eight runes to spell "disaster" literally, but you know what I mean. One wrong rune could ruin everything, including the researcher's prospects of surviving to see another dawn.

The researcher shivered and trembled, not just from loss of blood, and not from cold (it was summer south of the equator, though admittedly the cemetery in which he made his headquarters was at a high elevation and nights could get chilly), but also from the three-day and three-night fast that had to be a prelude to the dire necromantic spell called _mortuis excitans_.

Now, back in the sixteenth century, old Doc Johnny Dee and his tight bud Eddie Kelley used to practice a form of necromancy—sciomancy, if you need to know—back when Queen Elizabeth I was still a pretty hot chick (by her own standards). Sciomancy means communicating with the spirits of the dead to learn about the future, or the location of a treasure, or where the hell you left the car keys that you know full well you had in your hand just a minute ago.

Truth be told, there's no percentage in the practice. By the time the complex spell has been well woven and truly performed, the future the magician dreads has already happened, hidden-treasure stocks have tanked in heavy trading on Wall Street, and you just remembered your ex took the car in the settlement. That, by the way, is not irony, but it's close.

Anyway, regarding raising the dead: _Do not try this at home._

True necromancy, the real nape-of-the neck stuff, the darkest of the dark arts, is different from, oh, an accidental zombie resurrection spell read aloud from someone's notes. The real stuff calls the dead from their resting places, animates them, controls them—that is key, _control_ —and sends them to carry out the will of the magician managing the whole affair. It requires blood and pain and can bring on a fatal heart attack or if there is a mistake in any step, or, perhaps worse, a bad case of being dismembered alive by resentful corpses.

On the up side, refreshments for the crowd are cheap, because the dead do not eat . . . hors d'oeuvres.

And that kind of necromantic spell was what the researcher was about. The abandoned cemetery where he—well, don't say lived, say _dwelled_ —stood alongside a forsaken and never-frequented scrape of a road, badly eroded, that went nowhere in one direction and only a little better than that in the other; but if you turned left at the crossroads a mile from the rusted cemetery gate and followed the cart-track for another mile, you came to a small farming village where everyone was asleep by two in the morning, asleep and not expecting visitors.

About 300 people scratched out a living there. They had their own small church, with its attached and hallowed graveyard, and people from it (the village, I mean, not their graveyard) never, ever came up this way. After all, the other, bigger town that had once sent immigrants to the big cemetery had dried up and vanished thirty years earlier, when the mines played out.

Anyway, in recent years, the few people who made a hard living in the area had begun to be afraid of the place. Ever since the researcher had claimed the mausoleum as his home, eerie sounds and sights beneath the pale face of the shocked moon had frightened them away.

The researcher, in fact, had been through the little settlement only once, when he arrived in this country years ago, and he had never stopped in the village or spoken to any villager. True, he had arranged for a crazy shepherd to run occasional errands for him. When the researcher needed food or drink, he would tie a black strip of cloth to the scythe held by the statue of the Grim Reaper that stood beside the rust-frozen gate at the entrance to the cemetery.

When the shepherd saw that, he would come there and ring a bell—a verdigrised and tarnished old bronze thing that once had knelled for the funerals of the inmates. The no-longer animate inmates. Heavily cloaked, his face masked by thin black silk inside his hood, the researcher would come out, say what he needed, and give the shepherd money, and the next evening the shepherd would leave bread or wine or whatever. Or now and then, a live sheep, which he never saw again. In payment, the researcher gave him pills made from herbs that gave him wonderful hallucinations at night, sensual and lewd hallucinations that, one regrets to report, heavily featured amorous sheep.

Probably the crazy shepherd would never return, not after this night. Certainly not if he swallowed the handful of pills the researcher had turned over to him in exchange for the sheep. These wouldn't give the man visions. Rather the opposite, in fact.

The chant began at midnight, and more than an hour passed as the researcher intoned himself hoarse. After the first hour, the tombs began to crack and a sluggish, faintly luminous purple mist to curl out and creep along the earth. A little time more, and the earth itself trembled. And then, with groans that died and left no echo, skeletal forms dragged themselves from their graves and slouched down the ruined road, toward the village, glowing a faint, morbid green in the night.

The researcher leaned on a staff, gasping for air, until they had all left, dozens of them. None were fresh. Most had been decades dead. Some, however, still stank of rot.

They would lurch and stagger into the village, gibbering and screeching. They could not be killed—they were already dead. Shoot them, hack them with machetes, set fire to them, they didn't mind the pain, since they felt none. But they would very likely tear out your heart for irritating them. Most of the villagers would flee in terror. The dead would herd them like cattle dogs doing their job—not killing them unless they resisted, but shooing them miles and miles away from their homes.

The researcher followed the dead and as they scattered the populace, he busily went from house to house, an anti-Santa, rifling drawers, looking in all the places the poor hid their pittances of money. He had an aid in this search—his pendulum, which unerringly pointed to the exact loose floorboard under which a farmer had stashed silver and copper coins, to the hearthstone that could be pried up to reveal great-grandmama's ruby tiara and bracelets, long treasured as heirlooms. All went into the researcher's bag.

The coins were not those of the USA, of course. Most were small denominations, though he found quite a few troves of antique coins, left over from ancient eras, buried when the village had been a town and some few people (usually the unscrupulous ones) had become wealthy. Alas, the crafty and cunning wealthy had passed on without also passing on the location of these hoards.

The antique coins bore the names and images of long-dead rulers, and some would bring in many times their face value. Most of these hidden treasures—there were nearly a dozen in all—had lain completely forgotten by the living for a century or three. He took them all. The largest had only about fifty coins in it, but of them forty-seven were pure gold and thirty-three of them exceedingly rare.

As three o'clock passed, the researcher judged that he had enough money to begin his journey.

Not enough to make it easy. Not enough to bribe customs or immigrations inspectors. Not enough for an airline ticket, say. But he did not want that, did not care much for traveling in public, with people who would be interested in him and ask questions for which he would have to kill them quietly.

Better to plod on foot, alone, depending on the money he had now and would have later, after selling the coins to collectors. He spoke many languages without a noticeable accent and could find places to sell his goods easily enough.

He would have plenty of money to buy food and drink for a terribly long walk. It would take half a year, easily, even if he could walk every day uninterruptedly. He expected that he would be able to, um, _persuade_ drivers to give him rides now and then, unsuspecting farmers in trucks or foolish tourists who might think he had exotic herbs for sale. Such people would help, and then they could be discarded.

Say one hundred and seventy days to get to the general area. Not quite half a year.

Perhaps. . . by June.

However, he had no special goal. All he knew was "somewhere in the Pacific Northwest" of the United States. On the map Seattle looked good enough. Large place, could provide him with a base of operations. By then he would have . . . found more money. Money was never a problem. Procuring it from its present owners sometimes vexed him.

But, cheer up. When he finally reached the area, when he came to Northern California or even Oregon, he could use his pendulum with greater precision. It would lead him close to—wherever he needed to be.

More, even without the T'klatlumodh, he could charm people into helping him. He could be quite enchanting in a few special ways. True, the recipient of his charm would afterwards often throw himself or herself off a bridge, or spend hours kneeling in a booth frantically confessing unimaginable sins, or lose all trace of sanity, but they would have the comfort of knowing they had been helpful.

The researcher hitched the knapsack into a more comfortable position. It held the money, some clothing, and a book. _The_ book, really, an ancient manuscript bound in thin boards covered with an exotic leather, its title a difficult phrase in an archaic language. The book was like an external brain; it told him what he needed to know.

He might have lost the T'klatlumodh, but no matter. It had served its main purpose, had alerted him to the existence of the ten Powerful Ones. What remained was to find just one of them, just one, to work on and to ensnare, to corrupt and to turn to his will and his purposes.

Then, like dominos, not even suspecting that someone had descended on them, a hawk in a henyard, all ten would fall. And once he had turned them all, he could siphon their power and then discard them—not kill them, leave them as petty, evil creatures preying on others, what did he care?

It would not matter to him.

For he would have taken their power and would wield it to rule the world.

He had walked steadily and had traveled many miles by the time the first rooster crowed. When the sun rose and its rays touched them, the dead would collapse into loathsome heaps of decay and stir no more until the Last Judgment. The living villagers would creep from hiding places and go back to their homes.

Which were burning. He had set the scattered fires before leaving the place. A catastrophic blaze was a good way to conceal the thefts.

Where would the poor people live?

What did he care?

He walked on, and before long the first rays of the sun found the feathering top of the rising smoke plume. It hung there high in the air behind him, glowing, like a triumphant ghost.

And faintly, off somewhere in the distance a woman screamed.

* * *

 _The End_

 _(But I don't think we've seen the last of this guy.)_

* * *

 **Author's Note**

First, I'd rather be called a writer. I enjoy writing, but not authing. Second, I hope you've enjoyed the Mystery Twins' exploits and angsts and joys in their third visit to Gravity Falls.

Finally, yes, I mean to continue with my own personal AU arc. I don't know, maybe we'll hear a bit of what everyone's up to during the spring, or maybe we'll just join them in June, 2015, as their fourth summer away from home begins—the one in which they're heading toward that significant landmark of life, the twins' sixteenth birthday.

If they make it that far, of course . . . . heh, heh.

What am I saying? These are the people of the Zodiac! Sure, they're under attack by a dangerous and irredeemable villain, but, come on!

They've got a fighting chance.

Thanks for reading!

-Bill Easley


End file.
